In 2015, a Sloan Foundation grant to Open Knowledge led to the creation of the “frictionless data” standard, a set of protocols for packaging tabular datasets in uniform ways that could be used, if adopted widely enough, to greatly simply the logistics of exporting, transporting, and importing data. This grant funds efforts by Open Knowledge to broaden adoption of the frictionless data standard through outreach to scholarly organizations, data platforms, analysis tools, and specific research fields. Over the three-year grant period, Open Knowledge will use grant funds to conduct outreach and support activities, structured partly as high-touch field/context-specific pilots, and partly as broader outreach and engagement to the wider user community.

Major video game rendering engines are capable of rich 3D environmental rendering and physics simulation, not to mention built-in virtual and augmented reality capabilities. They are, however, rarely utilized in scholarly research, in part because researchers who have explored their use for data visualization have had to manage the arduous task of configuring and structuring their research data in order to load it into the game engine. This grant funds a two-year initiative by Huy Vo of the City College of New York to dramatically lower barriers to the use of game engines for scientific visualization. In the first year, Vo will develop a standardized workflow and open source plug-in for the popular Unity 3D gaming engine that will enable the easy importation of research data, generation of geometries, and construction of interactive visualizations. In year two, Vo will pilot the plug-in himself in two research collaborations (one with CUNY researchers on climate adaptation and the reliability of power sector infrastructure, one with AT&T Research Labs on mobile antenna placement). He will also use it as the platform for student projects in a CUNY data visualization course.

The International Geo Sample Number (IGSN) grew out of an initial need to foster better citation of geological samples. As of mid-2018, there are over 6.5 million individual physical specimens represented within the IGSN, and a network of 25 IGSN “allocating agents” across five continents. After a number of years of growth within geoscience, the IGSN is confronted with increased interest from other disciplines; for example, the IGSN has already been used to register IDs for biological specimens and archaeological artifacts. Rather than encourage the development of a number of different discipline-specific registries, Lehnert and an international team of collaborators plan to redesign IGSN to support physical samples and specimens from across the sciences. Funds from this grant support technical development of the IGSN platform and a series of working meetings to bring together current IGSN registrars, other stakeholders, and persistent identifier (PID) experts to strategically plan the organizational and technical future of the initiative.

This grant provides three years of support for gatherings of WikiCite, a project within the Wikipedia ecosystem designed to both improve citation within Wikipedia and to expand the Wikidata project in ways useful to the scientific community. Grant funds will support a dedicated annual WikiCite meeting, as well as a series of smaller satellite meetings at other Wikimedia events. The organizers will also maintain a strong presence at other scholarly communication meetings, bringing the energy and technical sophistication of the Wikimedia community to bear on innovation in scholarly communication more broadly.

This grant funds a project led by Jonathan Crabtree, Director of Cyberinfrastructure at the University of North Carolina’s Odum Institute, to improve and expand the capabilities of the Dataverse open source data repository platform. Odum is responsible for executing and implementing the Replication and Verification Policy for the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) and uses Dataverse as the underlying platform where authors who publish in AJPS can upload their data and software code to ensure results may be replicated. Because Dataverse was originally designed for data and not software, however, the process can be unwieldy and time consuming. Crabtree and his team plan to use the Jupyter computing platform and the open source software “containerization” toolkit Docker to create a “Confirmable Reproducible Research (CoRe2) environment” for Dataverse that would combine the ability to containerize computational research with communication and workflow tools. This would greatly speed and partially automate the process of verifying that submitted research results can be verified using the code and data uploaded. Grant funds will provide support for this project for three years.  years.

This grant funds a series of four projects by Mercи Crosas, Chief Data Science and Technology Officer at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science to expand and improve software handling capabilities of the Dataverse open source data repository platform. First Crosas will integrate Dataverse with Encapsulator, an open source tool that allows the creation of a computational “time capsule” that preserves the exact computational environment used to conduct a piece of data analysis. Second, Crosas will create links between Dataverse and Code Ocean, a computational reproducibility platform that was spun out of Cornell Technion’s incubator program. Third, Crosas will develop a set of metadata versioning and exploration tools that will increase incentives for data curation by returning richer usage statistics to data providers and publishers. Finally, Crosas will model and pilot a fee-based curation service that would allow the sustainable scaling of data and code curation in Dataverse. This work, like all other development on and organizational innovation within the Dataverse community, will be freely available and useful to the dozens of other institutions running the software to power their own data archives.

The Center for Open Science’s (COS) preprint platform was designed to serve a variety of scholarly communities, especially lowering barriers to entry for those disciplines new to preprint publication whose needs were not being served by the larger, more highly powered preprint servers like arXiv. This grant funds a project by COS founder Brian Nosek to use the COS preprint platform as the setting for a series of experiments that will test how user trust is affected by different preprint platform features. Nosek proposes to use the launch of already-planned features like annotation and visual icons to run a set of experiments on the assignment of trust by readers of scientific research. While the budget includes some technical development, the bulk of the requested funding will support the COS “metascience” team to take a mixed-methods research approach, combining surveys with analysis of usage data from the preprint servers to understand the impact of annotation and “reproducibility badges” on readers’ perceptions of trustworthiness of individual preprints and of the preprint server overall.

Somewhere between 50% and 60% of internet users use Google Chrome to browse the web. Chrome, unfortunately, doesn’t natively display mathematics using the standard XML markup language MathML. This forces sites like Wikipedia to generate static images of mathematical notation from the underlying MathML when Chrome can’t render the markup on its own. Not only does this have implications for accessibility, it also inhibits the development of innovative new interfaces and applications that would rely on dynamic interaction with mathematical notation via browser-based programming languages like JavaScript. Funds from this grant will support a project led by the National Information Standards Organization to implement full MathML rendering in Chromium (the open source codebase underlying the Chrome web browser). Technical development will be undertaken by developers at Igalia, an open source software consultancy that has played a key role in MathML integration in other major web engines.

This grant funds a project led by Brian Granger to expand and enhance Jupyter Notebooks—a powerful, popular, and open-source scientific computing platform—to enhance its handling of private, proprietary, or otherwise sensitive data. Planned features to be developed and implemented include a nuanced permissions structure that can be used to ensure that only properly credentialed individuals can see or manipulate data, stronger event logging and internal telemetry, and encryption of data both at rest and in transit. To test the software, Granger will work closely with a wide variety of data holders including a U.S. company dealing with health data; a German warehouse for financial data; and NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), which collect all kinds of municipal data. Grant funds support software development along with a host of dissemination activities that will promote and test Jupyter’s expanded capabilities among researchers dealing with sensitive data.

This grant provides funds for the creation and operation of the Administrative Data Research Institute (ADRI), a national membership organization designed to provide services and set standards for the global network of Administrative Data Research Facilities (ADRFs). An ADRF is a data intermediary, i.e., an institution that facilitates researcher access to private or sensitive data owned or held by corporations and government entities. To become a member of the new ADRI, member ADRF’s would have to provably maintain high data standards and practices, particularly regarding data privacy and security. In return, the ADRI would provide member institutions with expert advice and leadership concerning the many technical, legal, political, or privacy challenges that data intermediaries face. Above all, the ADRI would help engender trust in at least three domains where it is much needed: among the member intermediaries when it comes to arrangements for linking their data; among the data producers when it comes to negotiating data use agreements with member intermediaries; and among the public and their policymakers when it comes to allowing administrative data containing sensitive information to be reused through member intermediaries for research purposes. Grant funds support initial start-up and operational costs of the new network for a period of two years.

Funds from this grant support three different large-scale and randomized field experiments, devised by economists Matthew Gentzkow at Stanford and Hunter Allcott at New York University, that aim to help us better understand the various ways social media and smartphones impact our lives. In the first, Gentzkow and Allcott study the welfare implications of Facebook usage by measuring the impact of cutting off access to that platform. In the second experiment, the team studies how limiting smartphone access to social media and other apps affects the welfare of college students. The third experiment concerns the demand for “fake news” and investigates what happens to consumer behavior when incentives to find accurate information increase. Grant funds support the fielding and analysis of all three experiments as well as documentation of methods to enable easy replication by other scholars.

Nudging consists of changing how alternatives are presented in ways designed to help choosers select what they say they would ideally want. Substantial empirical evidence shows that nudges can significantly—and sometimes substantially—modify behaviors. Yet much remains mysterious about nudging, especially with regard to heterogeneous effects and behavioral welfare economics. How is it possible to create effective choice architectures when not everyone should be nudged the same way? This grant funds a series of experiments by Eric Johnson of Columbia University. He has devised a series of experiments about what he calls “smart nudges.” In contrast to the one-size-fits-all approach, these take into account how individuals differ. One idea is to set different defaults for different people depending on their background characteristics. Another technique, called “preference checklists,” presents a prospective decision-maker with a list of criteria that other people sometimes take into account when considering similar choices. Checking off the criteria that the decision-maker thinks should apply in this case is a way of bringing to mind factors that might otherwise be forgotten or ignored. Johnson’s hypothesis is that choice architectures that incorporate smart defaults and preference checklists will be welfare-enhancing compared to traditional one-size-fits-all nudges. Grant funds support the fielding and analysis of these experiments, and the publication of two papers on the results.

In economics, the assumption called “rational expectations” holds that the value of a variable expected by agents in a model matches the expected value predicted by the model. As a description of the decision-making processes of actual, real-life people, rational expectations models seem unrealistic. The idea nevertheless dominates much of contemporary economics, not least because it vastly simplifies the modeling process. This grant funds work led by Nobel laureates Tom Sargent and Lars Hansen to develop a robust, mathematically rigorous alternative to rational expectations models. Sargent and Hansen envision agents not as utility maximizers with fully rational expectations, but rather as decision-makers using Bayesian reasoning to update their beliefs in light of uncertainty and limited information. The approach, while technically daunting, is very promising as a better description of real life. Grant funds will support the development, debugging, and dissemination of new models and of the software for analyzing them as well as a workshop, conference, and travel expenses for junior scholars participating in the project.

Women economists cluster more in certain subfields (e.g., labor, health, public economics) than in others (e.g., macro, theory, or international trade). This grant funds work by labor economists Ron Oaxaca and Eva Sierminska to analyze this gendered difference in career choices among professional economists. Rigorously analyzing why men and women make career decisions differently requires holding unchanged as many factors as possible besides gender. Focusing on career choices in graduate school allows just that. Ph.D. candidates in the same program, for example, interact with the same group of professors and advisors, expect similar sets of potential salaries, and face the same specialization options. Grant funds are supporting the creation of a public use dataset, analysis of that dataset, development of a website about the project, and the production of two research articles and a less technical policy brief reporting the results of the analysis.

According to a Sloan-funded survey, Chief Privacy Officers at major corporations like Amazon, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, and General Electric say they are willing to share private data with independent scholars under two conditions. First, they want to take risks and institute policies that are similar to their peers. Second, to the extent that shared data helps academics gain insight into important societal issues, they want to be widely recognized for the role they played. This grant funds a project by the nonprofit Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) to launch a peer-to-peer network of private sector C-suite leaders called the Corporate-Academic Data Stewardship Research Alliance. Members will collaborate in order to encourage, recognize, and honor model data-sharing arrangements between the private sector and academe. The network will hold regular phone conferences as well as quarterly in person meetings to discuss how to overcome the legal, practical, and technical barriers that hinder cooperation with independent scholars. The network will also develop and publicize a CEO-level award honoring those corporate leaders who have made pioneering data-sharing agreements with independent scholars. Grant funds will help defray operating costs of the new network for 18 months.

This grant funds work by behavioral economists Erzo Luttmer from Dartmouth and Dmitry Taubinsky from University of California, Berkeley, who are analyzing how behavioral biases might explain the annuity puzzle—the observation that annuities, as a financial product, are not nearly so popular as economic theory and people’s stated preferences would predict them to be. Of the many possible explanations for the annuity puzzle, behavioral biases are not easy to study. Consumers who avoid annuitization might have privileged information and unobserved motivations (like making bequests, for example), or they may be systematically affected by behavioral biases that result in suboptimal choices. Teasing out what accounts for what is not just difficult, but also important for devising potential remedies. Luttmer and Taubinsky have carefully designed a series of controlled experiments where real economic incentives are at stake, but where most other complications from the real world have been abstracted away, thus allowing them to isolate how subjects’ psychological attitudes toward time and risk affect decision-making. By identifying the role behavioral mechanisms play in such decisions, this research will generate new insights about the annuity puzzle in particular, and also about the behavioral welfare economics of risk taking, saving decisions, and insurance markets more generally.

Behavioral economists assume that people make decisions based on the perceived probabilities of events. Behavioral experiments, interpretations, and the policies they inform should therefore depend on information about popular perceptions about likelihoods. This grant funds work by Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon and co-principal investigator Howard Kunreuther of the Wharton School to field surveys that will collect data on public perceptions of the probabilities for a host of important events, including nuclear war, chemical attack, opioid addiction, school shootings, as well as the mass adoption of driverless cars or e-cigarettes. Opinions about more than a hundred hazards will be elicited. In addition, Slovic and Kunreuther will conduct textual analyses based on the frequency that Google News describes a given hazard using words with high emotional valence. Last, the team will field a series of experiments designed to probe how people act on those perceptions and what can be done to help everyone make better estimates and better decisions.

This grant funds a project by Till von Wachter, professor of economics at UCLA and faculty director of the California Policy Lab at UCLA, to examine how retraining programs affect employment outcomes among older workers. Four research questions are at the core of von Wachter’s work: How has the incidence of employment instability and unemployment evolved for older workers? How well has the workforce system, particularly its job training opportunities, served older unemployed workers? What are the outcomes of job training and other services for older workers, in terms of employment and earnings? Has the ability of the system to improve older workers’ outcomes increased after recent legislative reforms? To shed light on these questions, Von Wachter has gained unprecedented access to a comprehensive linked dataset covering California’s workforce at the individual level. These data include quarterly earnings records for individual workers for each employment relationship, including identifiers for the employing establishment; quarterly employment, wage bill, and detailed industry affiliation for establishments; individual Unemployment Insurance (UI) claims, with detailed information on duration of claim, benefits received, worker demographics, occupation, and education; and detailed information on type of workforce service received, including type of training and job search assistance, the dates of service, as well as information from intake and exit interviews with caseworkers. Von Wachter’s work has the potential to advance understanding of how to use training to increase labor force participation of older workers and could inform local and national policymakers interested in improving the workforce system.

This grant provides partial funding for a project led by Martin Baily of the Brookings Institution to develop a new paradigm for work and retirement that incorporates working longer as an essential tool for increasing retirement security. Baily aims to develop the case for specific, actionable policy reforms that will encourage increased saving and enable longer working lives, as well as identifying policy reforms to enable consumers to have greater access to and understanding of retirement products in the private market. First, Baily will commission a series of detailed policy proposals that will be then presented in public forums—three public forums with three papers presented at each—directed at educating federal and (where appropriate) state policymakers. Each of the nine papers commissioned for the policy series will offer practical recommendations grounded in research that can be adopted by policymakers and private-sector actors. Suggested topics include how to make jobs more flexible, training for older workers, reducing the tax penalty for working longer, age discrimination, annuities, reverse mortgages, and long-term care insurance. After the briefings, Baily (with co-principal investigator Benjamin Harris) will then author a report that will lay out a comprehensive new vision for retirement. This will include three complementary components: reform of labor market policies to accommodate longer lives; creation of more robust private insurance markets and better products; and changes to the saving landscape, particularly for the growing population without access to traditional retirement accounts (for instance, freelance workers).

This grant funds a research network of economic scholars studying issues at the intersection of aging and work. Led by Kevin Milligan of the University of British Columbia, the network includes David Cutler of Harvard, Ellen Meara of Dartmouth, John Shoven of Stanford, Nicole Maestas of Harvard, Arie Kapetyn of University of Southern California, and Sita Slavov of George Mason, among others. Grant funds will support an annual workshop for network members and various other convenings allowing them to set a common research agenda, share ideas, and discuss and inform each other’s research. Over the next two years, network members will address various aspects of three topics: How public policy incentives affect work at older ages; what aspects of the workplace and employer practices can sustain work at older ages; and how older workers fit into the overall labor market. Overall, grant funding will support the production of at least eight academic papers on these topics.

This grant provides three years of continued support to the American Film Institute’s (AFI) efforts to encourage young screenwriters and filmmakers to write and produce compelling, engaging narrative films that explore scientific themes or have scientists, engineers, or mathematicians as major characters. AFI’s program includes three annual award programs: a $25,000 award given to the best student film project that brings science and technology to life; a $20,000 annual screenwriting award given to the best science-themed script; and a yearly tuition scholarship worth $45,000 given to an incoming graduate student with a background in the hard sciences who wishes to become a filmmaker and to incorporate scientific themes in his or her filmmaking. In addition, AFI holds a seminar series where established actors, writers, directors, and producers talk to students about science and Hollywood, and provides access to working scientists to serve as mentors on student scripts.

This grant, to the University of Southern California’s (USC’s) School of Cinematic Arts, provides three years of renewed support for a series of activities aiming to support student engagement with science as a subject matter in their work and to spur the development and production of science and technology film, television, and new media projects by USC film students. Supported activities include a $25,000 production award, given annually to the best student film project that features science and technology as a theme; two $17,500 screenwriting awards, given annually to the best student film or television scripts featuring science and technology as a theme; a $17,500 animation award, given annually to the best student animation project featuring science and technology as a theme; an annual $12,500 grant given to the most innovative student interactive game design project featuring science or technology as a theme; and a yearly seminar that brings USC film students together with leading scientists to discuss the power and potential of science as a vehicle in narrative filmmaking. In addition, grant funds will support a host of related support activities, including faculty mentoring, industry events, and dedicated science advisors to ensure accuracy of scientific content in student projects.

This grant provides three years of renewed support to the University of California Los Angeles, for a series of activities, programs, and initiatives designed to encourage UCLA film students to engage with scientific themes in their filmmaking and to produce science-themed films and screenplays. Funded activities include an annual colloquium that brings film students together with leading researchers to discuss the newest developments in science and technology; one annual, $30,000 production grant awarded to the best film project that incorporates scientific or technical themes; two annual $15,000 screenwriting awards given to the best student scripts incorporating scientific themes or featuring a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as a major character; one annual, $15,000 filmmaking grant for the best episodic television project that explores scientific or technical themes; and the development of a screenwriting course open exclusively to students who are working on a science-themed project. The course will help students explore both the challenges and opportunities of incorporating scientific themes into narrative film and television. In addition, this grant provides funds for dedicated scientific advisors to help students with their projects, independent judges to evaluate student submission, and faculty support and other operational costs associated with administration of program.  

This grant provides funds to the Science Festival Alliance (SFA)—a network and incubator of science festivals across the country—to promote the development and expansion of 12 science festivals across the United States in communities with small resource bases and with a focus on promoting diversity. SFA will select and recruit four leading festivals; they will spend the first year experimenting with different approaches to improving diversity. Each lead festival would create a customized plan for engaging diverse audiences with measurable indicators for progress that would be evaluated after 12 months. This new knowledge would then be applied in selecting the 12 new partners—each lead festival is responsible for recruiting and mentoring three new festival partners in communities with small resource bases. The 12 selected festivals would be given modest $2,000 professional development grants and then be eligible for $10,000 challenge grants as they develop their own plans. Grant funds support these activities and associated administrative and operational costs.

This grant supports the WNYC Health Unit’s ongoing coverage of health care policy, health economics, and the complexities and contradictions of the U.S. health care system. Over the three-year grant period, Sloan funds will help WNYC produce 45 to 50 broadcast segments each year on a range of health topics including the Affordable Care Act under the Trump administration, the opioid and obesity epidemics, and the gap in hospital billing between what hospitals charge and the real costs of care. Segments will be aired on several of NPR’s most popular radio programs, including Morning Edition, All Things Considered, The Takeaway, and the Brian Lehrer Show. In addition to these weekly segments, WNYC will produce two to three episodes of its Only Human podcast each year. The long-form serial podcast allows WYNC to take a deeper dive into complex health care issues, with a focus on extensive research, immersive storytelling, and rich characters. WNYC will also convene annual workshops, bringing together leading health care practitioners, economists, and policy experts to discuss the health care system and potential reforms. Last, grant funds will support a new radio drama, produced in collaboration with Radiolab, on the life and work of John Bonica, an anesthesiologist and a world champion wrestler also known as the “father of pain management.”

This grant to the Catticus Corporation provides support for the production and broadcast of a one-hour documentary special on driverless cars, “Look Who’s Driving,” that will explore both the promise and pitfalls as we move toward adoption of autonomous vehicles (AVs). In addition to explaining the major technological advances that have enabled progress in AVs—mapping, sensing, and artificial intelligence—the series will explore the engineering, legal, regulatory, security, privacy, and ethical challenges behind this much-ballyhooed potential revolution in transportation. The documentary will include interviews and commentary from leading technologists and engineers working on AVs, as well as scholars, historians, research scientists, and ordinary citizens. The show is slated to be broadcast on the PBS series, NOVA.

Funds from this grant support efforts by Consumer Reports (CR) to provide consumers with the knowledge and tools they need to make more informed choices about their digital privacy. Supported activities include refining the Digital Standard, an evaluative framework used to objectively rank consumer products based on how well they perform on security architecture, data collection, and user control over his or her own data. CR will bring together academics, thought leaders, technical experts, and industry players to review and suggest improvements to the platform. It will draw on its Consumer Insights Panel, a web-based tool that interacts with 4,500 consumers to inform more effective messaging and education strategies. CR will then use the revised Digital Framework to evaluate major technology platforms such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia. Finally, CR will publish its findings in a report to help inform future consumer choices and industry product development. The overall effort is designed to establish privacy as a core consumer value and to drive competition regarding who can do the best job protecting consumer privacy and individual ownership of data.

This grant supports a study examining whether the upgrading of existing electricity transmission lines can obviate the need to build new transmission infrastructure corridors. Under the leadership of Principal Investigator Granger Morgan, the research team will study different transmission line upgrading options, including re-engineering existing transmission lines to improve their carrying capacity or switching from high-voltage alternating current (HVAC) lines to high-voltage direct current (HVDC) lines. Data will be collected from state public utility commissions about proposed or planned transmission line upgrades. This information will then be analyzed using an engineering model of the transmission system to understand which transmission line corridors might be best suited to upgrading or current conversion based on their technical and economic specifications.

Innovation in the energy sector often comes from unexpected places, utilizing research on problems or issues that are not directly energy related but that turn out to have application in the energy sector. Understanding these “knowledge spillovers,” as they are called, is critical to gaining a complete picture about how new energy technologies evolve over time. This grant funds a project led by Venkatesh Narayanamurti of Harvard University, Laura Diaz Anadon of the University of Cambridge, and Gabriel Chan of the University of Minnesota to investigate how knowledge spillovers contributed to three different low-carbon technologies—solar photovoltaics, lithium-ion batteries, and solid state lighting. The team will analyze patent data from the PATSTAT database to determine which innovations from other fields have led to significant advancements for the three aforementioned technologies. The researchers will then supplement this patent citation analysis with a bibliometric analysis of academic publications and with additional expert interviews and consultations. The team will then use existing engineering cost models to identify how various innovations from outside the energy sector contributed to cost reductions for each of the three technologies under study. In addition to academic research, the research team will prepare shorter commentaries and policy briefs aimed at informing policymakers and other nonspecialists about research results.

Pecan Street is an independent nonprofit organization that is a leading provider of high-resolution residential energy use data to the research community. Through its testbed of volunteer instrumented homes, Pecan Street is able to collect disaggregated circuit-level energy use information at 15-minute, 1-minute, and, increasingly, 1-second intervals. This unique data set is then provided free of charge to the academic community, helping facilitate research known as nonintrusive load monitoring (NILM), which allows scholars to disaggregate household-level energy use based on the unique power “signature” of each monitored appliance. Funds from this grant will allow Pecan Street to expand their data collection efforts through three interrelated projects. First, they will increase the number of homes within their existing test-bed in Austin, Texas that collect energy use data at 1-second intervals. Second, they will integrate additional data from Independent System Operators (or ISOs) around the country—information such as wholesale market pricing, forecasting, and generation information—that enriches the energy use data collected from the Pecan Street testbed. Third, Pecan Street will expand the number of instrumented homes in its network, adding in 100 additional homes in both upstate New York and the Bay Area of California.

This grant renews funding for a set of predoctoral fellowships in energy economics. In each of the past three academic years, Meredith Fowlie (University of California, Berkeley) and Ryan Kellogg (University of Chicago) have led a committee that solicits applications and selects a number of young academics for these two-year predoctoral fellowships. Selected fellows are generally in the final two years of their doctoral program and are conducting one or more studies examining different dimensions of the energy system. Previous fellows have come from an array of universities, including the University of Tennessee; University of Wisconsin, Madison; University of California, San Diego; and Cornell University, among others. The announcement for predoctoral fellowship applications is shared widely within the economics community, and the selection committee has received approximately 20 high-quality applicants each year. Funds from this grant will fund an additional two cohorts of three fellows each. In addition to covering stipend and tuition coverage, a small amount of money is provided for purchasing necessary data and for travel to professional meetings.

The OXIDE project, based at the Johns Hopkins University, aims to advance diversity and inclusion throughout the academic career ladder in chemistry. OXIDE collects data, disseminates it to the broad chemistry community, and holds department chairs accountable for their success or failure to promote diversity in their departments. This “top-down” strategy to promote change has been shown to be successful for industry. OXIDE’s accountability strategy is largely executed at NDEW, the National Diversity Equity Workshop, an intensive two-day meeting that has been held biennially by OXIDE since 2011. Funds from this grant will support two more NDEWs, in 2019 and 2021, and the annual publication and dissemination of data on diversity equity statistics in chemistry for four years. OXIDE’s target objectives for the project period include the participation of approximately 60 chemistry department chairs in the biennial NDEW, an increase in chairs’ proficiency in the value proposition for advancing diversity and addressing known barriers to diversity equity; an increase in departmental efforts that are managed by the chair that advance local diversity equity outcomes; and a transition in organizational funding from heavy reliance on grant support to substantial reliance on funds provided by the institutions of the participants.

Funds from this grant provide support for three years of continued operation of the New York Academy of Science’s Science Alliance Leadership Training (SALT) program. The program aims to provide leadership training to a yearly cohort of 30 early-career scientists drawn from members of the NYAS Science Alliance. Cohorts are intentionally selected to promote diversity and prior cohorts have included significant numbers of women and underrepresented minorities. Supported activities for each cohort include a five-day intensive workshop followed by monthly webinars for nine months to expand and reinforce leadership skills. Additional funds will support a longitudinal analysis of program participants to enable rigorous evaluation of program impacts.

In 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Maria hit Puerto Rico, devastating the island and disrupting most scientific research and education. Sloan responded by granting $4,000 to each of 35 chemical and chemical engineering graduate students at the University of Puerto Rico Mayagьez (UPRM) and Rio Piedras, allowing them to use the funds in whatever way they saw fit to best continue their educations. Disruptions continue, however, and this grant to the University of Puerto Rico provides enhanced funding to help doctoral STEM students continue their educations in the wake of Maria and Irma. Grant funds will allow 24 doctoral students to conduct research for four to six months at a collaborating mainland laboratory; support a lecture series at UPRM; and provide travel funds for faculty to attend scientific conferences and meetings and for graduate students to visit mainland campuses for supplementary mentoring, including practice job talks. Additional funds will support data collection and analysis that will allow evaluation of program impacts.

Funds from this grant support a project by Tara S. Kahan, Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Saskatchewan, in collaboration with Jianshun Zhang, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, at Syracuse University to examine indoor photon fluxes and determine concentrations, sources, and sinks of indoor oxidants and oxidant precursors. The project will combine laboratory, field, and chamber studies to better understand oxidizing capacity from emerging precursors in residences. Kahan will investigate the sources and sinks of indoor oxidants by measuring oxidant precursor concentrations in three residences, measuring indoor photon fluxes under a range of conditions, and determining oxidant concentrations via chamber experiments that simulate indoor conditions. The results will be shared through peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Environmental Sciences & Technology and Indoor Air. The team also plans to make presentations at conferences and meetings, including meetings of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate and the American Association for Aerosol Research. One postdoctoral scholar, three graduate students, and one undergraduate student will be trained on this project.

Reactive nitrogen species—nitrous acid (HONO), ammonia (NH3), and amines (NR3)—are present indoors. These reactive nitrogen species are important because of the associated chemical and physical transformations. Outdoors, amines are implicated in particle formation. And HONO is photolabile, which means it decomposes in the presence of light, generating the important oxidant hydroxyl radical. Hydroxyl radicals can then rapidly react with volatile organic compounds, leading to secondary aerosol formation. Detecting concentrations of these chemicals is vital to answering key questions about the chemistry of indoor environments, such as “What is the role of ammonia and amines in indoor chemistry?” and “To what extent do they contribute to new particle formation?” This grant funds a team led by Trevor VandenBoer, Visiting Professor of Chemistry at York University, that aims to develop analytical platforms for the detection of reactive nitrogen indoors. The work plan has three parts. First, the team plans to develop new selective sampling methodologies for the passive collection of HONO, ammonia, and amines in indoor environments. Second, they plan to design and construct a real-time monitor for HONO and total reactive nitrogen that can discriminate between gas and particulate pools. Finally, they will validate the new methods both against traditional benchmarks and through deployment in various indoor environments. The team plans to share their findings through peer-reviewed articles and presentations at several scientific and professional conferences. One postdoctoral fellow, three graduate students, and numerous undergraduates will be trained in the course of the project.

Funds from this grant support a team led by Brent Williams of Washington University in St. Louis to improve our ability to collect and analyze indoor air samples through the development of a chemically resolved volatility and polarity separator. The project aims to build and test a new field-deployable automated instrument for the simultaneous measurement of organic gas and particle chemical composition. The work plan has three parts. First, Williams and his team will develop a modified volatility and polarity separator capable of detailed chemical characterization of the particle phase and gas phase of airborne indoor organic material. Next they will demonstrate the strengths of the new measurement capacity through controlled laboratory studies and through an indoor field study. Last, they will develop an open-access volatility- and polarity-separated chemical profile database of indoor sources and transformations, along with open-access data analysis codes for use by the indoor air research community. Predicted outcomes of this project include the new instrument, the open access data base, and new knowledge about the composition of indoor air. The team plans to share their findings through multiple peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations on instrument development and through open-access chemical databases and analysis codes. One postdoctoral fellow and three graduate students will be trained.

Mass spectrometry is a technique that ionizes chemical species and then sorts them by mass. While useful, spectrometry does not distinguish between chemical isomers, species with the same number and types of atoms as another chemical species. This is important; isomers possess distinct properties because their atoms are arranged into different chemical structures. Isomers may differ, for instance, in reactivity, vapor pressure, and the identity of products. This grant will support work by Delphine Farmer, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Colorado State University, in collaboration with Ellison Carter, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, to develop and test novel software for time-of-flight chemical ionization mass spectrometry that will allow researchers to identify isomers based on differences in binding energy. Funded work includes software development, calibration, and validation using both individual isomers and mixtures of isomers, and field testing in an unoccupied residence. The project will result in new software for both data acquisition and analysis, as well as field datasets, for sharing with the broader scientific community. The findings will be shared through publications from the instrument development component of the proposal, and additional publications when the instrument is used in an indoor study. The project will train at least one Ph.D. student in indoor chemistry and mass spectrometry instrument development.

Funds from this grant support a team lead by Virginia Tech’s Gabriel Isaacman-VanWertz to improve our ability to detect chemical isomers indoors through the development of a field-deployable gas chromatograph coupled to a chemical ionization mass spectrometer. This proposed research is divided into three technical tasks: First, Issacman-VanWertz will engineer the physical and technical interface between the major instrument components. Then he will characterize and calibrate the new instrument. Finally, he will deploy the instrument in an on-campus controlled indoor environment to examine emissions. The team plans to share their findings through peer-reviewed articles and presentations at several scientific and professional conferences.

Test bed studies require Chemistry of Indoor Environment researchers to be able to make important indoor chemistry measurements quickly and at low cost. Unfortunately, there are no good low-cost sensors for volatile organic compounds (VOCs). This grant funds an effort to build one. It’s an important effort. Many VOCs are harmful to human health and even those that aren’t can react with oxidants, eventually leading to new particle and aerosol formation. Over the next three years, Jesse Kroll—Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—will attempt to develop a low-cost monitor for measurements of volatile organic compounds in the indoor environment. The work plan has two major parts: the construction, characterization, and optimization of the VOC monitor, and the use of several such monitors in real indoor environments, providing both a proof-of-concept and initial measurements of indoor VOC levels. The primary output of this project will be the monitor and associated algorithms as well as the associated research results. Descriptions of the optimized monitor design and calibration algorithms will be disseminated broadly via the peer-reviewed, open-access literature and conference presentations. At least one graduate student will be trained.  

Outdoors, strong ultraviolet light from the sun drives the photolysis of ozone, resulting in the production of hydroxyl (OH) radicals. Hydroxyl radicals, sometime referred to as “nature’s vacuum cleaner” are highly reactive and short lived. They can react with volatile organic compounds leading to the formation of peroxy radicals. These radicals, in turn, react rapidly with a range of compounds, eventually producing secondary organic aerosols in the atmosphere. Yet much is unknown. Despite the absence of the strong ultraviolet light that drives oxidation reactions outdoors, there is preliminary evidence that indoor environments contain hydroxyl radicals. The pathways that generate these radicals and the role they play in indoor chemistry are mysteries. Funds from this grant support an effort by Philip S. Stevens (Indiana University), in collaboration with Brandon Boor (Purdue University), to examine radical concentrations and associated aerosol production in indoor environments. The team aims to improve our understanding of oxidation chemistry in indoor environments through comprehensive measurements of radical concentrations, including their sources and sinks, as well as the impact of radical concentrations on aerosol production in several laboratories, chambers, and at least one residence. The results of the studies will be shared through peer-reviewed journals and through presentations at meetings of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, the American Chemical Society, and the American Association for Aerosol Research. At least four students will be trained.

Hydrolysis is a reaction in which water is used to break down chemical bonds. Preliminary evidence suggests hydrolysis reactions could be very important indoors, breaking down common man-made ester (MME) compounds like those found in PVC pipes, and diffusing the resulting degradation products into the air. This grant funds a project by V. Faye McNeill, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University, to assess the impact of hydrolysis reactions of a range of man-made esters—occurring on damp indoor surfaces—on indoor air quality. Grant funds will allow McNeill to adapt her outdoor atmospheric chemistry model, GAMMA (Gas-Aerosol Model for Mechanism Analysis), for application to the indoor environment. The adapted model, GAMMA-CIE, will introduce MME species, intermediates, and reaction products into the aqueous phase chemical mechanism, incorporate mass transfer between the aqueous and gas phases, and model oxidation in the gas phase. In addition to this modeling work, McNeill will perform laboratory measurements to provide missing data for the MME hydrolysis cascade under alkaline conditions and will examine the effect of acidic pH and ionic content of the aqueous film on MME hydrolysis kinetics. Among the MME compounds to be characterized are Texanol, a component of latex paints; TXIB (trimethyl pentanyl diisobutyrate); BBzP (benzyl butyl phthalate); and DEHA (diethylhydroxylamine). Last, McNeil will use the modified model to predict indoor air quality under typical domestic and commercial building scenarios. The model will simulate the fate of esters and the role of damp surfaces in realistic indoor conditions, providing new insights about indoor chemistry.

This grant provides operational and administrative support to the governing secretariat of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO), headquartered at the Carnegie Institution for Science, which is charged with coordinating and synthesizing the work of DCO’s researchers, who number more than 1,300 and are spread across some 40 countries worldwide. Grant funds will offset operational costs of the international steering committee; provide support for the secretariat chairs, geoscientists Robert Hazen and Craig Manning; facilitate the DCO’s grand finale in Washington, D.C. in October 2019; and support several activities aimed at securing the legacies of the DCO at the conclusion of Foundation funding.

In 2015, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey established a Faculty and Student Team (FAST) program to improve on the low numbers of underrepresented minorities (URMs) both in the SDSS collaboration itself and in astronomy as a whole. The FAST program introduces clusters of faculty and students (mainly URMs) from non-SDSS-participating universities into the collaboration, usually with one faculty member supervising anywhere from one to three undergraduates or one graduate student. These faculty-student teams are then paired with mentors from the SDSS collaboration to help them become full members of the collaboration. To date, institutions sending FAST teams to SDSS include DePaul University, New Mexico State, University of California San Diego, Texas Tech, and two from City University of New York (Hunter College and Staten Island). Funds from this grant will allow the addition of three new FAST teams to the project, each completing a three-year term. Each FAST team faculty lead receives salary support for approximately one summer month in their first year of participation, and students on each team receive financial support through the entire period of FAST program participation. A dedicated SDSS FAST science liaison oversees the day-to-day operation of the program.

On the one hand, more and more decisions are being made based on what machines can learn about us: who gets a loan, who gets into college, who gets insurance, etc. On the other hand, people have many reservations about the fairness of algorithms, about algorithmic perpetuation of biases built into historical data, about the mis- or overinterpretation of statistical correlations, and more. This grant funds work by economists Jens Ludwig from the University of Chicago and Sendhil Mullainathan from Harvard to study when, why, and how people should override recommendations based on artificial intelligence. The team will focus on how New York City judges decide to release or hold suspects before trial. Machine generated recommendations—ones that use facts about a suspect to predict whether that subject will commit a crime if released back into the community—are already in use. But judges are also privy to information about a subject that a typical algorithm is not, including a suspect’s courtroom dress, demeanor, accompanying associates, etc. Ludwig and Mullainathan will study whether and how these additional factors affect both judicial predictions of suspect behavior as well as AI predictions of judicial behavior.

This grant funds efforts by Avi Goldfarb, Joshua Gans, and Ajay Agrawal, three leading economists from the University of Toronto, and Catherine Tucker, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT, to facilitate rigorous research on the economics of artificial intelligence (AI). Building on a successful conference on the economics of AI held in Toronto in 2017, the team plans to hold a series of three more annual conferences on related topics, commissioning papers for each conference, then publishing and disseminating the collected conference proceedings. Over three years, the team anticipates commissioning more than 50 academic papers. The team will also organize extensive training, support, and other services for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows interested in studying the economics of AI. The plan is to train more than 90 early-career researchers in advanced methodological and analytic techniques.

This grant provides partial support to the National Academy of Sciences for a consensus report on how to use insights from the behavioral, social, and statistical sciences to improve the reliability and reproducibility of research. The project will include five committee meetings featuring various experts across the sciences, five commissioned papers on reproducibility, an expert panel on behavioral economics and the professional incentives facing producers and consumers of research, and a final consensus report. While the majority of the funding will be provided by NSF, this grant will provide supplementary support both for including economic perspectives in the study and for disseminating the final report.  

Between 1947 and 1973, U.S. productivity grew an average of nearly 3 percent per year. Since 2007, that rate has dropped to 1.3 percent. Since 2010, it has plummeted to 0.5 percent. China and India excepted, other countries around the world have experienced similar drops in productivity growth. Why? What is going on? This grant funds a project by a team led by Louise Sheiner at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution to shed light on this “productivity puzzle.” Over the next two years, Brookings will conduct and commission original and rigorous research on productivity, engage with stakeholders at U.S. statistical agencies about the quality and limitations of existing productivity measurements, produce 10 to 12 peer reviewed papers, hold six conferences on this and related issues, produce a conference volume, and disseminate recommendations on how to improve research and statistics about economic productivity.

This grant provides partial support for a new report, The Future of Storage, which will bring together scientific, engineering, economic, and policy perspectives to describe the current state and future potential of technologies to store electricity and the differing roles these technologies might play in the evolving energy sector. Part of MIT’s well-regarded “Future of” series, the project will assemble a panel of top scholars from mechanical engineering, energy systems analysis, and economics to address a host of policy-relevant questions about electricity storage. Questions to be addressed by the study include what role storage might play in electricity systems over the near term (by 2030), midterm (by 2040), and long term (by 2050, and beyond); which storage technologies have the greatest potential for application over various time scales and service requirements; and what public policy, technology development, and market factors most influence the future of electricity storage. Grant funds will provide approximately one-third of the total study cost. 

The social cost of carbon (SCC) is defined as the cost to society in dollars of releasing the equivalent of one ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The SCC is a key input measure to almost every legally required cost-benefit analysis of energy and environmental regulation. To properly quantify the SCC researchers need to improve the estimation of damage functions, the models that lay out how climate changes affect the economy. The Climate Impact Lab (CIL) at the University of Chicago, partnering with scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and Rutgers University, is developing the next generation of climate-economic damage functions. The new functions are orders of magnitude more advanced than existing integrated assessment models, providing a spatially detailed, granular set of damage functions for over 25,000 regions globally. Grant funds will support development of the CIL model, its computing infrastructure, and salary support for one postdoctoral and two predoctoral fellows participating in the project.

This grant provides support to the Washington D.C.–based nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future (RFF) to organize and host a conference that brings together researchers, policymakers, and various stakeholders to discuss the state of academic research about the economic, environmental, security, and policy trade-offs associated with the increased deployment of low- and no-carbon resources and technologies and to share research findings and insights on these issues developed by researchers funded through the Sloan Foundation’s Energy and Environment program. The conference will take place in late fall 2018, with nearly 100 participants drawn from academic, government, industry, and nonprofit sectors and will be structured as a series of research panels focused on topics such as energy efficiency, transportation, and transmission and distribution, which have become core areas of concentration within the Sloan Energy and Environment program. Additional thematic panels will be interspersed that advance methodological perspectives such as analyzing large-scale data sets and highlighting best practices to integrate research into decision-making. There will also be a dedicated session for students to present their work, along with a number of networking opportunities allowing participants to interact informally with one another. In addition to organizing and hosting the conference, RFF plans to record the event and potentially live-stream it. 

Funds from this grant support efforts by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to organize a series of conferences that would each showcase six papers by leading academic energy researchers that have been written for policy audiences and that are designed to address policy questions about energy or environmental policy. The conferences, held annually, will aim to strengthen relationships between academic energy researchers and their counterparts in the policy realm, with around 100 participants expected to attend each year. Following each conference, papers will be revised and published in an annual volume titled Environmental and Energy Policy and the Economy. In keeping with standard NBER practice, no explicit policy recommendations will be made by research published in this project. Grant funds will support the hosting of the annual conference and publication of the associated research volume for the next three years.

Funds from this grant continue support for postdoctoral researchers studying energy, natural resource, and environmental economics at the Washington D.C.–based nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future (RFF). Grant funds will support one, two-year postdoctoral researcher position in each of the next two years, and RFF will raise matching funds to support a second postdoctoral fellow each year. The RFF program has several important strengths. First, supported postdoctoral researchers will split their time between defined projects and independent research, allowing them the opportunity to build a strong list of publications that is vital to securing a longer-term university or other research position. Second, postdoctoral researchers will have the opportunity to build and expand their professional networks in policy, academic, and private sector circles, providing them with a broader range of subsequent career opportunities. Third, researchers will be trained in valuable skills like grant writing, public speaking, presenting material to policy audiences, and event organization, all of which will be critical for advancement in their careers. Fourth, RFF will draw on a deep roster of senior in-house scholars and its extended network of affiliated university faculty to provide job placement services and career guidance. To date, the placement record for postdoctoral researchers in this program has been strong. Fifth, there are no other federally or philanthropically funded energy and environmental economics postdoctoral researcher positions of this kind, making the RFF program unique in the field. 

There is substantial interest within the research community in studying the energy and environmental implications of the development and spread of new technologies. These technologies include digital sharing platforms like Uber and Airbnb, artificial intelligence and robotics, and distributed ledgers like Bitcoin. Questions abound. How might the use of autonomous vehicles for ride sharing affect vehicle miles traveled? What approaches might mediate the impact of blockchain energy use? Can digital ledger systems be used to track pollution effectively? This grant supports efforts by David Rejeski of the Environmental Law Institute to build a multidisciplinary research community of scholars interested in studying these topics. Funds will support 8 to 10 small research projects to study questions about the environmental and energy impacts of new technologies. Projects will be selected by an independent expert review panel through an open solicitation process. In addition to direct research support, this grant provides funds to hold two workshops—one at the project’s outset and the other at its conclusion—to bring the selected researchers together to share information about research methodologies, data sources, and potential challenges. It also funds the creation of a website to serve as a resource that will include informational bibliographies, publicly available data sources, and final research outputs.

This grant to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering funds three-year renewals for the University Centers of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); University of California, San Diego; and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. UCEMs are the primary funding model for the Sloan Foundation’s Minority Ph.D. (MPHD) program. NACME provides the administrative and fiscal support for management of all Sloan funding for UCEMs. Funds granted to each UCEM are used primarily for $40,000 scholarships for underrepresented minority doctoral students. Between the three schools, an estimated 61 students will receive such scholarships over the next three years, with a similar number of “matching” students receiving support from each UCEM’s host institution. Additional grant funds support programmatic expenses associated with the recruitment, retention, and mentoring of these students and activities to promote their successful completion of graduate study.

Funds from this grant provide two years of support for the continued administration of the Sloan Student Grand Jury Prize, which honors the best science- or technology-themed feature film script produced by a student at one of the Foundation’s six participating film school partners: American Film Institute, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, NYU Tisch, UCLA, and USC. Each participating school submits one script for consideration each year, and nominated screenwriters are then paired with a dedicated mentor to help improve their submissions with an eye toward shepherding the script to production. An independent panel of distinguished filmmakers and scientists then selects the winning script, whose screenwriter or writers receive a $20,000 prize and a cocktail reception in their honor. They also receive support for an industry mentor to guide the project, a committed science advisor, other marketing and distribution efforts, and two professional development workshops to further develop the project.   Additional grant funds will support the pilot creation of a new $10,000 prize for the best science- or technology-themed feature film script submitted by film students drawn from one of six schools outside the Foundation’s existing group of film school partners. Schools invited to compete for this new “Sloan Discovery Prize” include Brooklyn College Feirstein School of Cinema, SUNY Purchase School of Film and Media Studies, Florida State University, San Francisco State University, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and the University of Texas, Austin.

This grant provides operational and administrative support for the National Math Festival, a biannual celebration of mathematics and mathematics research held in Washington, D.C. The festival, which drew crowds in excess of 20,000 people in both 2015 and 2017, features publicly accessible lectures on mathematics, interactive exhibits about mathematical concepts, and demonstrations for adults and children of the beauty of mathematical patterns and their prevalence in virtually every facet of life. Grant funds will support production of the National Math Festival in 2019 and 2021, the fielding and analysis of attendee surveys to improve the festival’s offerings, production of a documentary about the festival, and expanded outreach through the web and social media.

This grant provides one year of support to the PBS NewsHour to continue its regular broadcast of Making Sen$e with Paul Solman, a weekly segment that explains business and economic issues clearly and engagingly to a general audience both on air and online. Grant funds support the production of 50 7-to-10-minute Making Sen$e broadcast segments on major issues facing the American and global economy, such as tax policy, health insurance, immigration, and the gig economy. Additional grant funds support increased outreach and development of the Making Sen$e website and social media presence, and the production of hundreds of original pieces of web native content, including long-form think pieces written by economists or based on Paul Solman's interviews with economists.

Modeling is essential to the development of indoor chemistry as a field. Comprehensive, integrated physical-chemical models that include a realistic representation of how buildings influence indoor processes are needed to assess gaps in our understanding, to improve experimental design, to generate hypotheses for investigation, to guide measurements, and to indicate key species to quantify and the detection limits required for quantification. The MOdelling Consortium for Chemistry of Indoor Environments (MOCCIE) consists of six teams of investigators with expertise and models in six different areas: kinetic process modeling, gas-phase chemistry modeling, molecular dynamics simulations, modeling of indoor secondary organic aerosols and organic aerosols, computational fluid dynamics modeling, and modeling surface interactions and the role of clothing and textiles. MOCCIE has determined that the best way to ensure reproducible indoor chemical science would be to strive to construct a fully integrated open source model. This requires converting each of the six existing MOCCIE models into an open source format. Funds from this grant would support a project to convert Nicola Carslaw’s gas phase chemistry model into a fully open source platform using the Python programming language. Additional funds support the construction of a new user-friendly interface to facilitate the model’s use and production of supporting documentation.   In addition to the modeling work, Carslaw will work to expand science communications about indoor chemistry by engaging a U.K.-based freelance science journalist, Nina Notman. Notman will attend indoor chemistry events and conferences, and give a plenary on science communication at the 2018 Indoor Air Conference.

Funds from this grant provide 21 months of support for the continued operation of the Deep Carbon Observatory’s Synthesis Group 2019 (SG 2019). Led by University of Cambridge geologist Marie Edmonds, SG 2019 is tasked with overseeing and managing the synthesis of the intellectual output of the DCO, bringing together into a coherent whole the diverse observations, insights, models, and datasets generated over the past 10 years by hundreds of DCO scientists across the globe. Funded activities include the writing of a decadal report summarizing the DCO’s scientific and technical accomplishments; the planning and execution of several culminating events in 2019; the production of infographics, videos, and educational materials based on DCO insights; and the production of several synthesis papers for publication in high-value journals like Nature and American Mineralogist. Grant funds will provide administrative and travel support to Edmonds, allowing her to work closely and effectively with DCO leadership in the United States and around the world.

The core work of the Deep Carbon Observatory’s engagement team, headquartered at the University of Rhode Island (URI), consists of community building and management. The team writes the DCO’s newsletter, maintains a contact database of DCO-affiliated scientists, produces the DCO bibliography, handles educational and outreach partnerships with entities such as National Geographic and the Smithsonian, updates articles about the DCO and deep carbon science in Wikipedia, and conducts all media relations. As the DCO moves toward its planned conclusion in 2019, the engagement team will have additional responsibilities associated with the synthesis of DCO research and the effective communication of its import to the wider scientific community and the public. This grant continues operational support for the DCO’s engagement team for 21 months.

This grant will support four integrated research projects on the role played by nontraditional work arrangements—defined as jobs that lack benefits and that have significant wage and hour volatility—in the labor market decisions of older workers. Led by Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, three of the projects focus on workers in their 50s and early 60s who may consider themselves too young to retire. The first project examines the extent to which the apparent rise in nontraditional employment for older individuals reflects the loss of traditional jobs to globalization and automation. The goal is to learn how the spread of these pressures to more industries could increase nontraditional work. To the extent that more older workers hold nontraditional jobs, the second project explores how these jobs are part of late-career employment patterns. Do these workers move back into traditional employment, for example—and, if so, after how long—and how often and for how long do they stay in nontraditional work for the remainder of their careers. The third project addresses the question of whether older nontraditional workers obtain access to retirement savings vehicles and health insurance through other sources, such as their spouses, public programs, or their own initiative. The fourth project focuses on an older group of workers—those in their 60s who are old enough to retire but are still working—and examines the extent to which nontraditional jobs help these workers improve their retirement security relative to retiring early.

Funds from this grant provide four years of continued support for a multidisciplinary postdoctoral fellowship program at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies (HCPDS) at Harvard’s School of Public Health. The Harvard fellowship program is designed to provide opportunities for seminars, mentorships, and speakers, with the goal of catalyzing a Cambridge-based research community for scholars of aging and work that will become part of the growing community of researchers focused on the intersection of aging and work. Grant funds will provide stipend support for two two-year fellowships along with subsidiary funds to support the fellows’ travel and research needs.

This grant funds work by Katharine Abraham and John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland and Susan Houseman of the Upjohn Institute to bring greater precision to our understanding of how to define and count the “alternative workforce,” and to gain deeper understanding of the roles the different types of alternative work arrangements play in older workers’ lives. Partnering with Gallup, Abraham and her team will field a nationally representative telephone survey of adults aged 18 to 80, asking them about their nontraditional work arrangements. The team will then create a new dataset by linking survey responses with administrative data from tax filings and household surveys. The new dataset will allow the team to probe how alternative work arrangements fit into the labor market behavior of older workers. Questions of interest include whether and to what extent alternative work arrangements are used during periods of traditional unemployment; whether they are a prelude to re-entry into the traditional workforce; the extent to which they are used to supplement retirement income, to offset the risk of 401(k)s, or to balance elder care responsibilities with the need to earn money; and what role the social aspects of work and its capacity to help structure one’s days play in the decision to take up an alternative work arrangement. These questions beg a more fundamental one: are these arrangements positive choices or options of last resort for older Americans? The created dataset will be made publicly available for use by other researchers and the project team expects the project to produce at least two peer reviewed papers, as well as a series of policy briefs and presentations aimed at both scholars and policymakers.

Distributed volunteer computing has not changed substantially since the late 1990s when the SETI@Home project offered a downloadable screensaver that used spare PC computing cycles to analyze radio astronomy data, and thereby allowed hundreds of thousands of citizens to participate in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Computer scientist Josh Bongard at the University of Vermont proposes to bring that idea of volunteer computing into the internet era by building a volunteer computing platform that lives in the web browser, allowing users who visit a special webpage to contribute computing capacity and/or disk storage to computational researchers. This grant will provide three years of support to Bongard and his team for the initial build out and deployment of the platform, which could complement or provide an alternative to local supercomputing facilities and cloud services from companies like Amazon or Microsoft.

This grant to WNET, New York’s PBS station, in partnership with Windfall Films, supports the production and broadcast of a three-hour series about one of America’s biggest infrastructure projects: the rebuilding of LaGuardia airport, which is currently underway and slated for completion in 2021. Episode One: A Grand Terminal will focus on the state-of-the-art, 1.3-million-square-foot terminal itself, including its history and an overview of terminal design. Episode Two: Runways and Highways will cover building the runway space that surrounds the terminal, including flood-proofing the new taxiways—LaGuardia is surrounded on three sides by water—and preparing for environmental threats such as climate change and hurricanes. Episode Three: Bridges, Belts, and Baggage will explore the construction of two skybridges to get passengers from the new terminal to the 35 boarding gates as well as upgraded systems for moving baggage and passengers. The series will discuss a host of topics in science and engineering, including new construction techniques and machinery, the logistics of urban planning, impacts on local communities and the environment, tailoring runways to limit noise pollution, advanced radar technology to detect runway debris, and the use of swarm modeling mathematics to efficiently guide passengers and avoid congestion. In addition to primetime broadcast, grant funds support the production and dissemination of complementary educational resources through PBS Learning Media, and outreach through social and other media. 

Each year since 1973, the Sloan Public Service Awards have recognized six outstanding civil servants out of the hundreds of thousands who work for New York City government. The Fund for the City of New York manages the nomination and selection process and refers to the awards as “the Nobel Prizes of Government…, the highest award that can be bestowed upon a New York City public servant.” Nominated by their colleagues and selected by a blue-ribbon panel of distinguished New Yorkers, each of the six winners receives a $10,000 cash prize and is honored at individual celebrations at their workplaces and at a citywide celebration at the Cooper Union. This grant continues the Foundation’s long support of the Sloan Public Service Awards with funding for an additional three years.

This grant supports research by information scientists Matt Germonprez (University of Nebraska) and Sean Goggins (University of Missouri) to develop and test rubrics for the evaluation of the health of online, open source development communities. Building on previous work that resulted in the successful Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project and using a rich dataset drawn from GitHub and other sources, Germonprez and Goggins will investigate how definitions of the health of an online community might rightly vary depending on the type of community in question or type of project being jointly developed, how the injection of money into an online development community influences individual contributor behavior, and how individual decisions by contributors impact overall community health.

One crucial component of the current and future data workforce is the data curators who steward and curate research data in the interests of reproducibility and reuse. Academic libraries seeking to increase data curation support face a structural problem, however: it’s simply not possible to hire an expert data curator for every discipline. From 2016 to 2018, seed funding from the Sloan Foundation was used to plan a network that could facilitate the sharing of disciplinary data curation expertise across a cohort of partner universities. Funds from this grant support the launch and expansion of this Data Curation Network over the next three years. Initial participating institutions include Cornell; Duke; Johns Hopkins; Penn State; and the universities of Minnesota, Michigan, and Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The grant will support a modest amount of each participating data curator’s time, a network coordinator to be based at the University of Minnesota under the supervision of principal investigator Lisa Johnston, annual meetings of the network, and a business consultant to test business models and plan for sustainability beyond the funded launch period.

Computers do nothing but process logical statements. Mathematics consists of nothing but such statements. It would be reasonable to assume, then, that computers would be adept, perhaps uniquely, at reading, understanding, and cataloging the academic literature of mathematics. Not yet. People and machines, it turns out, speak different mathematical languages. If computers are to help manage mathematical knowledge, they need to be taught how to read math papers. The grant funds efforts by mathematician Thomas Hales to begin that instruction. Hales has raised an international army of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, which he plans to unleash on the abstracts of thousands of mathematical papers. They will carefully translate the definitions and results that appear in these abstracts into formal programming language. These formalized abstracts—“fabstracts,” for short—can then be used to train machine learning algorithms to “read” textual mathematics.   

This grant supports the launch and operation of a new working group at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) dedicated to studying the “economics of science.” Led by Paula Stephan, the group will bring together top flight economists to share existing work and findings, identify new areas for research, examine methodological and data issues, and commission new research. Topics include incentives in the current system, how the structure of grants and review systems affects scientific risk taking, the costs and efficiencies of different research funding models, how to judge scientific quality, and how to measure return on investment in basic and applied science. Along with four meetings of the working group, the grant will fund administrative and planning costs, support for small research grants, and partnerships between the working group and institutions like research universities or other science funders.

This grant supports the expansion of a popular seminar on computational social science, run by Matthew Salganik of Princeton University and Christopher Bail of Duke University. The instructional program, which takes place over the summer, involves lectures, group problem sets, and participant-led research projects. The seminar also includes outside speakers who conduct computational social science research in academia, industry, and government. Topics covered include text as data, website scraping, digital field experiments, nonprobability sampling, mass collaboration, and ethics. Interest in the program has been robust, with more than 10 times as many applicants as available slots each year. Sloan funds will allow lectures and course content to be broadcast via interactive video to six new satellite locations, including City University of New York; Northwestern; University of Colorado, Boulder; Seattle; Helsinki; and Cape Town. Additional satellite sites may be added in future years.

Harvard econometrician Jose Zubizarreta is developing new statistical methods for the extraction of causal inferences from large datasets. His methods flexibly adjust for covariates in observational studies while also yielding more stable causal estimates. For part of the research, Zubizarreta will investigate formal and theoretical properties of these methods. His team, however, based as it is at a medical school, will also work on specific applications. These require, for example, developing a new framework for the design and analysis of observational studies with discontinuities, or developing new methods that improve the degree of control (covariate balance) and statistical efficiency of randomized experiments that enhance their generalizability. Zubizarreta plans to produce five peer-reviewed papers on these topics. In addition, all software, code, and examples will be produced in an open source programming language and made freely available, together with documentation and sample data, to the academic community and the public.

This grant funds an initiative by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to join with peer institutions from around the world to launch international dialogue about policies governing artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Partners include the National Academy of Engineering, the Canadian National Research Council, the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Participants will include government officials, industry leaders, and academic researchers from many different countries in addition to the United States, U.K., China, and Canada. Topics to be addressed include national security, data use and privacy, and legal and intellectual property conundrums related to AI. Grant funds will partially support a workshop and associated webcast, a subsequent workshop report, and the creation and dissemination of supplementary resources for participants and the public.

One of the most far-reaching ambitions of the Deep Carbon Observatory is an omnibus modeling effort to integrate knowledge about the movements and transformations of carbon, an effort spanning the core, mantle, and crust over the four and a half billion years since Earth’s formation. The prospect is daunting, ranging from molecular processes to lava flows, to continent formation, from diamonds, to microbes, to billions of tons of sinking sediments, from temperatures conducive for life to those that melt iron, from pressures allowing delicate films to form to those that crush carbon into diamonds, and from momentary events to those so slow that in comparison the adjective “glacial” describes the blink of an eye. In addition, the temptation to model the evolution of the planet, including the emergence of life and the biosphere, proved irresistible.  Funds from this grant provide continued support to the Deep Carbon Observatory Modeling Forum in its efforts to provide an intellectual framework for the DCO’s modelers and to create key component models to speed and integrate their work. Over the next 21 months, the project team will continue its work developing open access platforms and tools for the modeling and visualization of deep carbon. Funded activities include software development, participation in the wider DCO’s synthesis activities, the holding of a workshop on modeling and visualization, and a series of “immersion” workshops designed to introduce DCO researchers to immersive model visualization.

If you are working with data using the Python programming language, you probably rely on an open source software library called NumPy which provides tools to store large multidimensional arrays and matrices, algorithms for their analysis and manipulation, and means to move them from one software package to another. Without NumPy, scientific computing in Python would be slower, more cumbersome, and more error-prone. Initially released in 2005, NumPy’s core code has built up a substantial “technical debt,” which not only constrains the future development of the platform but also creates a high barrier to entry into its open source developer community. This grant supports an ambitious project led by NumPy core developer Nathaniel Smith to discharge this technical debt and set in place standards and architecture to encourage more sustainable development going forward. Using this funding, Smith and a team of developers will develop new modular systems for creating data types and arrays of data within NumPy; conduct a wholesale clean-up of the NumPy codebase; and launch a new community engagement process that includes face-to-face meetings, the onboarding of new contributors, and processes for proposing and evaluating larger architectural changes to the platform.

The Moore-Sloan Data Science Environments (DSEs) are a major collaboration between Sloan and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to support three university-based data science centers devoted to empowering data-driven research through the creation of new tools, resources, infrastructure, and career paths that help university researchers make the most of the possibilities that data science opens for the 21st century scientist. Supported centers have been launched at the University of California, Berkeley; NYU; and the University of Washington. This grant provides funds for the hire and support of a DSE coordinator who will take responsibility for internal communication between the DSEs, serve as a visible point of contact for inquiries and outward messaging for best practices coming out of the DSEs, and develop a network to connect and support “alumni” who have in one way or another left the DSE universities and are now building data science capacity at other universities. This new coordinator position will be initially housed within the Hopewell Fund, an arm of the New Venture Fund.

Data Carpentry is community-driven organization that develops and teaches workshops on the fundamental data skills needed to conduct research. A sister effort to Software Carpentry, which provides researchers with hands-on training in the basic software engineering skills that are increasingly needed for the conduct of 21st century science but are unlikely to be taught in standard scientific PhD curricula, Data Carpentry workshops target researchers who think of themselves not as software developers, but who may write custom code for the management, preparation, and analysis of their research data. Because the size, shape, and format of data differ substantially across disciplines, the “Data Carpentry” curriculum is necessarily domain-specific in a way that Software Carpentry is not. After initial successes in ecology, genomics, geospatial data, and biology, the Data Carpentry leaders will use the funds from this grant to grow into new disciplines (image analysis, economics, and chemistry), in the process standardizing their curriculum development processes in order to make it easier to form new disciplinary communities. Over the next two years, Data Carpentry plans to assemble Advisory Committees for each area of focus, run curriculum-building hackathons, and then pilot each bootcamp several times before releasing to the broader community of Software/Data Carpentry members.

The Research Data Alliance is an international grassroots organization that brings technologists, developers, and researchers together to jointly develop and adopt data-sharing infrastructure, tools, and practices. RDA working groups tackle some of the thorniest topics facing data science today, including reproducibility, data preservation, interoperability, data citation, and best practices for data repositories. RDA provides useful services to the data-driven research community, including to many grantees supported through the Foundation’s Digital Information Technology program. Funds from this grant provide core operating support to the U.S. regional chapter of the RDA and support efforts to build out the organization’s U.S. administrative infrastructure and grow its membership base. Funded activities over the next three years include the production of reports detailing RDA data sharing recommendations, member outreach, creation of adoption case studies for RDA products and services, trainings, annual stakeholder meetings, and the development of a long term business plan for independent sustainability.

This grant provides three years of support to an ongoing postdoctoral fellowship program administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) that aims both to grow data and software curation capacity within research libraries and to develop the next generation of data and software curators who will bring deep research experience into the organizational context of the university library. Fellows are PhD-level researchers who are selected, in part, for their potential to build collaborative relationships with natural and social scientists across the university. Since the launch of the program in 2012, fellows have been placed at a wide variety of universities, working with scientists and library staff on projects to improve the university’s data and software curation services and responding to requests from researchers to build tools and resources that speak to their needs. Recent participating institutions include UC Berkeley, MIT, Yale, the California Digital Library, Vanderbilt, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and the U.S. Agency for International Development. Funds from this grant will support the 2018-2020 class of CLIR fellows, which includes a cohort of four software curation fellows as well as four additional data curation fellows in the natural and social sciences. In addition to covering some salary, travel, and professional development support for fellows, grant funds cover operational costs associated with the administration of the program.

Yale University Library digital archivist Euan Cochrane leads one of the most ambitious software archiving programs in United States research libraries. Currently accessible to Yale faculty and students, the Yale software collection relies on open source software called bwFLA that enables the creation, management, and distribution of “virtual machines” which can simulate the hardware of an older computer on a newer computer and then run older software on the simulated machine. In practice this means that if you have the right credentials, you can go to the Yale Library website, click a link, and suddenly be running Windows 3.1, the original MacOS, or any other operating system and software, right in your browser. This grant supports efforts by Cochrane and his team at Yale to further develop this infrastructure and, working with the Software Preservation Network, to cultivate this capability at other institutions. The grant will support focused work on four use cases: scientific software, CD-ROM archiving, restricted-access reading rooms, and a “Universal Virtual Interactor” that would automatically launch the correct software and version to open any given digital file. Other supported activities include technical refinements to the bwFLA platform and the archiving of the National Software Reference Library currently held by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology.

The World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), co-directed by Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics and Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman at the University of California at Berkeley, provides high quality, fully public access to comprehensive and reliable data on income and wealth inequality. Surprisingly easy to use, the website allows researchers, journalists, and the public to access raw data, read the methodology of how those data were collected and processed, and improve them through their own contributions. WID.world datasets combine fiscal, survey and national account data in a novel, systematic way that produces reliable income time series and minimizes well known problems related to self-reporting and “under-reporting at the top.” Funds from this grant support the continued expansion and improvement of WID.world. Plans include expanding the number of countries covered to include China, India, Brazil, and several African states; improving data on the full income distribution; using collected income data to study issues such as tax fraud; improving the sites statistical tools; and adding new data variables like gender and environmental inequality. In addition, the research team will hold several workshops to facilitate use of the site and improve coordination with other researchers and large organizations such as the World Bank and IMF.

The new Center for Scientific Evidence in Public Issues (the “Scientific EPI Center”) being launched by the American Association for the Advancement of Science aims to help bring scientific evidence to bear on public policy issues. The need for such a center has been discussed in Washington for decades, beginning when Congress closed its own Office of Technology Assessment in 1995. As impartial scientific expertise in government and think tanks has dwindled, policymakers increasingly turn to lobbyists or other self-interested parties. What is needed, instead, is a source of impartial experts who can bring our best scientific understandings to bear on policy issues as diverse as climate change, cybersecurity, AI, and renewable energy. This grant provides funds to the new Scientific EPI Center for the hiring of a full-time economist or other empirical social scientist. The addition of such a full-time staff will allow the Center to benefit from the rigorous frameworks and models developed within economics for the analysis of incentives and behavior, provide a guide to the voluminous economic literature that bears on policy issues, and ensure that Center reports and recommendations are informed by economic insights about trade-offs, opportunity costs, nudges, and elasticities. Qualifications for this position include a Ph.D. as well as years of scholarly achievement, policy experience, and management practice.

This grant provides two years of support for the continued production and improvement of the Columbia Energy Exchange podcast series, produced by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP). Launched in 2015 and hosted by veteran energy journalist Bill Loveless, the 30-minute, weekly podcast features in-depth, one-on-one discussions with top thought leaders in the energy sector. The podcast series has featured an impressive network of leaders from across the energy system, including former government agency heads from the United States and abroad, CEOs of energy companies involved in a wide range of industries (oil, gas, electricity, nuclear, and renewables), and top analysts from energy think tanks, consultancies, and NGOs. Past guests include former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, Canada’s Minister of Environment Catherine McKenna, Chevron CEO John Watson, and the World Bank’s Head of Energy Riccardo Puliti. The podcast series also features research results from CGEP-affiliated scholars and its weekly release schedule enables CGEP to address topical and relevant energy issues as they rise in the public discourse. Sloan grant support will provide funds for the production of 50 episodes of the series over each of the next two years, allow CGEP to produce transcripts of each episode, and enable necessary technical improvements to upgrade the podcast’s audio quality.

Many analyses examining the transition to a low-carbon energy system in the United States identify carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration (CCUS) technologies as critical in order to make progress toward deep decarbonization. These technologies have proven difficult to develop and scale, however, and much uncertainty remains about the durability and longevity of policies and incentive structures designed to demonstrate their feasibility. Funds from this grant support work by David Victor and his team at the University of California, San Diego to examine the economic, political, institutional, and technological barriers that are impeding the development of CCUS technologies. First, the team will survey the literature and develop a typology of canonical CCUS technology features being used in different CCUS demonstration facilities, such as the adopted method of carbon dioxide sequestration or the planned industrial use of the carbon dioxide byproduct. They will then select a set of demonstration plants that represent a broad array of different CCUS features to study, conducting semi-structured interviews with a wide range of industry leaders, government representatives, scientists, engineers, and non-governmental actors involved in these projects. Their analysis will focus on the regulatory, institutional, and technological barriers and opportunities that have shaped the development of CCUS technologies to date with the aim of extracting relevant lessons that can be learned as this suite of technologies moves ahead. At the end of the project, the UCSD team will organize a structured workshop to review the research results and share findings with the broader community of researchers and practitioners.

There is a growing debate in the energy and environment community about the role to be played by geoengineering as a response to climate change. Solar radiation management (SRM) technologies, which involve injecting aerosol particles into the atmosphere to cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight, are increasingly central to these discussions. SRM technologies may be developed quickly, have the potential to be relatively inexpensive, and could be easily scaled. However, SRM research and its associated deployment raises many underexplored concerns related to moral hazard, technological uncertainty, unintended externalities, and potential irreversibility. In particular, little is known about the public’s understanding of SRM technologies, their potential concerns, and what procedural and governance safeguards might be put in place to allay them. A multidisciplinary team of scholars at Arizona State University (ASU) proposes to conduct a series of public dialogues with the aim to better understand public views on the development, and deployment of SRM technologies. First, the ASU team will conduct an initial framing and design workshop with subject matter experts to develop rubrics for discussing SRM technologies with the public. Next, they will hold two forums, one in Arizona and the other in Boston, each involving over a hundred members of the lay public. Trained social scientists will lead structured focus groups that will inform participants about SRM technologies and solicit their views and perspectives. Multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative data will be collected throughout the process, including pre- and post- event surveys and interviews. A final expert workshop will then integrate and assess collected data and present findings to policymakers and the research community.

Researchers Tanya Heikkila and Chris Weible from the University of Colorado, Denver plan to undertake a research project that will examine the role played by different stakeholders and policy actors in contributing to the degree of conflict and concord surrounding the siting of energy infrastructure projects. Heikkila and Weible will examine stakeholder coalitions formed during the planning, permitting, and approval stages of various energy infrastructure projects, including renewable energy projects (wind farms and large-scale solar installations), transmission lines, and pipeline build-outs. They will first identify a variety of recently proposed large-scale energy infrastructure siting projects. They will then focus on a select set of each project type, representing a diverse array of stakeholder coalition characteristics, for more detailed study. Projects under study will include not only successful siting projects but also those that were terminated or abandoned due to stakeholder opposition. Heikkila and Weible will then interview key stakeholders and policy actors involved in the siting of each project and conduct detailed textual analyses of media coverage and public records related to permitting decisions.

This proposed grant will provide partial funding for four Ph.D. students per year for two years (eight total) to conduct research on energy data analytics at Duke University’s Energy Data Analytics Lab (EDAL). Candidates will be drawn from a range of natural and social science disciplines—economics, engineering, environmental science, computer science, statistics, mathematics—and will be required to have faculty supervisors drawn from both energy-related domains and data-science relevant disciplines. Each pre-doctoral fellow will be expected to produce at least one paper that emerges from their fellowship research. All datasets produced will be made available through the EDAL repository. Fellows will has access to EDAL’s high performance computing environments and have the opportunity to lead an undergraduate energy data science team over a summer term. An Energy Data Analytics Symposium will be held at the end of the grant period to feature student work and that of invited internal and external senior scholars.

Among the most critical, unanswered research questions in energy and environmental policy is determining the economic impact of carbon dioxide emissions on society. This measure, the social cost of carbon (SCC), is defined as the dollar value cost to society of emitting one ton of carbon dioxide (or carbon dioxide equivalent gas) into the atmosphere. Estimating the SCC is necessary for conducting cost-benefit analyses of more than 150 federal laws and regulations in the United States. This grant to Resources for the Future (RFF) provides partial support for a large scale initiative that would develop an improved computational platform for estimating the SCC. RFF plans to put in place an integrated, modular framework that disaggregates the SCC estimation process into four distinct modules: socioeconomics, climate, damages, and discounting. Doing so will allow the best natural and social science research in each area to inform projections and estimations on each topic. These modules will then be linked together through an open source, computationally efficient, publicly accessible, and fully documented platform. This approach will help economists and climate scientists better compare similarities and differences among the three major integrated climate assessment models that underpin the SCC.

This grant to the Council on Library and Information Resources funds a fellowship program for four, two-year postdocs interested in working at the intersection of energy economics and data science. As large, complex datasets on energy production, transportation, and use become increasingly available, demand has emerged for a new type of scholar with one foot firmly in energy economics—the data it uses, the questions it asks, the methodologies it deploys—and one foot in data science. These fellowships aim to fill some of that need by creating postdoctoral positions that provide such training. Supported fellows will work on a diverse array of projects such as energy data visualization, integrating multiple datasets, and establishing university-wide energy data storage and access platforms. Fellows will be placed at four energy research centers that are existing grantees in the Foundation’s Energy and Environment program: University of California Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas, the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, Duke University’s Energy Data Analytics Lab, and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. Fellows will be selected in close cooperation with researchers at each institute, ensuring that candidates have both the skills and research interests each institute needs. As a signal of demand for the fellows, participating Centers have agreed to cover 50% of each fellow’s stipend and benefits costs. The fellowship program will be administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources, which has experience running several successful fellowship programs and has well-established recruitment, selection, mentoring, and professional development processes, including annual network-building workshops and the provision of micro-grants to selected fellows for collaborative projects.

This award provides for the establishment of a new University Center of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) to be hosted at Duke University. The heart of the Foundation’s longstanding Minority PhD program, UCEMs are campus-based initiatives that provide scholarships, faculty and peer mentoring, professional development activities, and seminars and other resources aimed at promoting underrepresented minority students’ (URMs’) successful completion of graduate study. The Duke University UCEM will encompass nine science and engineering departments: chemistry, computer science, mathematics, physics, statistical science, biomedical engineering, civil and environmental engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering and materials science. Over the three-year grant period, 30 minority graduate students will be supported with $40,000 awards over and above their standard graduate student support packages, half from Sloan grant funds and half from Duke matching funds. In addition, UCEM faculty and administrators will enhance and expand their minority outreach, aiming for a 20% increase in URM applications and at least a 10% increase in URM matriculants to the UCEM-participating programs over the life of the grant. Other funded activities include a coordinated set of professional development and support activities for supported students, including mentorship, seminars, and networking opportunities.

This grant funds a pilot project at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) that will leverage the insights and infrastructure of the university’s successful Meyerhoff Scholars program to identify talented minority undergraduates with an interest in pursuing advanced degrees in economics and provide them with high quality mentoring and training that will help prepare them for success in top flight graduate programs. Funded activities include: Hosting of several workshops per year to inform students early in their college years about career opportunities available to economics PhDs; Creation of faculty working groups in economics, math, and other STEM fields to examine how undergraduate course pathways influence the potential for doctoral work in economics; Provision of advising, mentoring, group support, and financial support for interested students; Offering of summer research experiences to 15 undergraduates over five years at either UMBC or at one of several other approved research universities or institutes; and The award of five stipends to UMBC graduates for two-year research assistantships in Sloan-approved economics-focused post-baccalaureate programs.

This grant provides partial support for a two-year initiative by the National Academies’ Board on Higher Education and Workforce to produce a thoroughly-researched consensus study on effective mentoring practices and the role these practices play in improving student persistence and expanding diversity and inclusion. Examining both undergraduate and graduate mentoring programs, the study aims to identify areas for future empirical research and to evaluate the impact of varied mentoring programs in STEMM (STEM+Medicine). A parallel effort will develop an online, interactive resource guide so that institutions, departments, individual faculty, and student development professionals will be able to access fully-vetted materials and resources on mentoring and customize them for their own use. Plans are to convene a study committee of 8-12 members; hold two-to-four in-person committee meetings and four-to-five virtual committee meetings; complete a critical review of the literature; organize workshops and stakeholder engagement activities; publish the committee report; develop, test, and launch the interactive online resource; and assess the project’s uptake and impact.

This grant provides 40 months of continued funding for the MSRI Undergraduate Program (MSRI-UP) at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. The MSRI-UP program includes (1) an annual six-week summer research experience for 18 undergraduate mathematics students from underrepresented groups working in research teams of three, (2) colloquia and professional development workshops, (3) presentations at national math conferences following the summer program, (4) an introduction to a wide community of peers and mentors, and (5) long-term follow-up and mentorship. The research efforts of participants will result in technical reports posted on MSRI’s website, oral presentations at a culminating symposium, and presentations at various national conferences. Of former MSRI-UP participants with bachelor’s degrees, 82% have continued into graduate programs, including 70% in doctoral programs. Though the program was only started in 2007, 45 alumni have gone on to earn MS degrees and 20 have completed PhDs. These achievements are especially noteworthy given the program’s focus on recruiting underserved students who are not clearly headed for a graduate program in mathematics and who are not high GPA students from elite high schools.

Founded by civic technologist Noel Hidalgo, BetaNYC is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping key New York City constituencies take advantage of already-accessible open civic data. Hidalgo has identified New York’s borough president offices and community boards as particularly promising sites of leverage where better access to civic data could be of direct and immediate value to local governance, and where better technical literacy and capacity could tangibly improve New Yorkers’ experience of government. Among its programs, BetaNYC runs a Community Information Fellowship that places CUNY undergraduates in the Manhattan Borough President’s office, where they identify and work to fill gaps in technical expertise at the community board. This grant would build on that program to pilot a “Civic Innovation Lab” in the Borough President’s office that will build prototype solutions to data problems identified by these fellows. The grant is being made to the Fund for the City of New York, a not-for-profit that provides fiscal sponsorship and administrative support to charitable efforts aimed at benefiting the City and its residents.

The $500,000 grant to MIT will establish the Paul L. Joskow Fellowship Fund (the “Fund”) in honor of Paul L. Joskow, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation from 2008 through 2017. MIT will hold the grant as an endowment, allowing donors and others to add to the Fund at any time through gifts, donations, and distributions from trusts, estates, or other entities. MIT will use Fund income to provide financial support, including fellowship support, to graduate students studying energy economics, environmental economics, and industrial organization, in accordance with MIT graduate student financial assistance policies and procedures. Support may include funds for the acquisition of research data, for travel to professional meetings, and for other research-related outlays by the students. Recipients of fellowship assistance from the Fund shall be known as Paul L. Joskow Fellows. This grant was made on the occasion of Dr. Joskow’s retirement as President of the Sloan Foundation and in tribute to his decade of service to the Foundation and its mission.

This grant continues a Sloan partnership with the Sundance Film Institute for a series of initiatives that promote the development, production, and distribution of science-themed films. Annual initiatives include The Sloan Commissioning Grant, which is awarded to a screenwriter or producer with an early-stage science-themed project to support its development. The award includes a cash grant; a stipend for a science advisor and research; mentorship; and year?round staff support from Sundance. The Sloan Lab Fellowship in the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program, which supports the participation of a filmmaker and his or her science-themed script in the Screenwriters Lab, Screenwriters Intensive, or Creative Producing Summit; Winners participate in the Feature Film Fellows Track at the Sundance Film Festival and are eligible for additional Feature Film Program Labs. The fellowship also includes a grant to support the development of the project, including funds for science research and advice. The Sloan Lab Fellowship in the Sundance Institute Episodic Program, which supports a writer with an early-stage episodic project to support its development for television or online platforms. It includes a cash grant to support the development of the project, a stipend for a science advisor, and mentorship and other support from Sundance staff. The Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, which is selected by a jury of film and science professionals. This award and accompanying cash prize is presented at the Sundance Film Festival to the writer and director of an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer, or mathematician as a major character. The Scienc-in-Film Forum at the Sundance Film Festival, which is a moderated panel discussion featuring independent filmmakers and leading scientists and technology experts. Grant funds support these initiatives and additional outreach, publicity, and administrative costs for a period of two years.

Funds from this grant continue a partnership with the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) to promote the development and release of science-themed films and support filmmakers who explore scientific or technological themes in their work. Each year, the TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund issues an open call for new and established filmmakers to submit science-themed film treatments, finished screenplays, or works-in-progress. After a rigorous independent review process, 2-6 projects are selected each year for support. Winning projects receive between $10,000 and $75,000 to help usher the project toward completion. In addition, winners receive year-round support from TFI, including mentorship, workshops, readings, inclusion in the annual TFI Network market, and arranged industry meetings. TFI also hosts a highly publicized and well-attended screening and panel discussion of a science-themed film at the Tribeca Film Festival each year along with an associated reception. Lastly TFI is launching a new Alumni Discretionary Fund that will provide microgrants to previously supported projects, providing a critical intervention that helps ensure supported projects are continuing to move toward production and release. This grant provides support for these and related activities for a period of two years.

This grant supports a series of activities by the San Francisco Film Society (SFFS) to nurture, develop, and champion films that explore scientific or technological themes and characters. Supported activities include the awarding of two $35,000 fellowships per year to promising screenwriters who are exploring scientific or technological themes in their work. In addition, SFFS will give an annual award, the Sloan Science in Cinema Prize, to the best science-themed feature film submitted to the the San Francisco Film Festival and will promote the winning film at the festival with a ceremony, screening, post-screening panel, and reception. The Festival will also host a yearly Since in Cinema Project Summit, which will bring together scientists and screenwriters to identify and publicize an annual “top ten” list of new scientific stories that would lend themselves to narrative screenplays. Lastly, SFFS will partner with the Blacklist to identify promising science-themed scripts and bring them to the attention of developers, producers, and other film industry executives. Grant funds support these activities and associated operational costs for the next two years.

This grant provides two years of continued support for the Coolidge Corner Theatre Science on Screen series, a grant program that helps independent theaters across the country pair current, classic, cult, and documentary film screenings with thoughtful introductions by notable figures from the fields of science, technology, and medicine. Grant funds will allow Coolidge to make 56 grants to independent theaters over the next two years, bringing to 70 the number of participating cinemas across the country. Each theater in the Science on Screen series receives a grant of between $4,000-$8,500 to facilitate three screenings a year with expert STEM speakers, at least one of which is a film developed or awarded a prize through the Sloan Foundation’s Film program. Additional grant funds support a National Evening of Science on Screen in which all the participating theaters hold coordinated screenings as well as funds for marketing and promotion of the program, website improvement, SEO optimization, and social media outreach.

This grant funds a project by WNET, working with physicist Brian Greene, the World Science Foundation, 59 Productions and CounterPunch Studios, to adapt the live stage piece “Light Falls: Space, Time, and an Obsession of Einstein” for broadcast on public television. The piece, which debuted at Lincoln Center during the 2016 World Science Festival and is narrated by Greene, traces Einstein’s journey to the discovery of the general theory of relativity. The piece walks the audience through the stages in Einstein’s journey—from his boyhood fascination with a compass to his desperate efforts to understand gravity to his fear that mathematician David Hilbert would beat him to the general theory. In addition to providing historical information about Einstein himself, the production will explain, explore, and make compelling key scientific ideas related to the general theory such as Lorentz contraction, time dilation, the equivalence principle, Riemannian geometry, and curved spacetime. The producers, working with the award-winning CounterPunch Studios, will also explore deploying a pioneering holographic rig that can generate a digital, life-like, three-dimensional rendering of Einstein so that Greene can interact and converse with a realistic looking historical figure. The completed production will be broadcast on the one hundredth anniversary of the 1919 solar eclipse measurements that confirmed Einstein’s theory and made him the most famous scientist in the world.

This grant provides two years of support for continued production and broadcast of Open Mind. Hosted by Alexander Heffner and broadcast on 214 PBS stations, Open Mind is a 30-minute, one-on-one interview show that dives deeply into a rich variety of topics pertinent to the public discourse. Grant funds will allow Heffner and the Open Mind team to interview five Foundation-supported science and technology authors per year, allowing them to discuss their books and the ideas behind them in a thoughtful and engaging public forum. An additional 3-5 interviews per year will focus on topics of Sloan Foundation interest such as the Digital Public Library of America, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or the economics of the aging workforce. Additional grant funds support efforts to improve the reach of the program, including expanded outreach on social media and enhanced promotion of the Open Mind podcast.

This grant funds a project led by Assistant Professor Marina Vance of the University of Colorado, Boulder, in collaboration with Associate Professor Delphine Farmer of Colorado State University to initiate the development of a data infrastructure for the field of indoor chemistry through an interdisciplinary collaborative field experiment named “House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry” (HOMEChem). The HOMEChem experiment will take place at a test house at the University of Texas at Austin in the summer of 2018, where researchers from 9 universities will aim to identify the most important factors controlling chemistry in indoor environments. Teams from each of these nine universities will make a wide range of measurements of the test house, including building and ventilation metrics; environmental parameters; spectral radiance and photolysis rates; aerosol concentrations and size distributions; aerosol composition; and the presence or absence of elemental and oxidized carbon, gas and particle phase organics, nitrogen oxides, ozone, nitrous acid, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and methane. Many of these factors will be the subject of multiple measurements by more than one instrument, allowing comparison of instruments and collection methodologies. In addition, Vance and Farmer will conduct controlled experiments regarding cooking and cleaning, so see how these common household activities affect the chemistry that takes place inside the house. The HOMEChem experiment promises not only to result in new knowledge about indoor chemistry, but to surface important issues regarding shared data and metadata needs among indoor chemists and to build community as the various research teams work together to execute the experiment and interpret their joint findings. Research results will be shared through at least eight publications and twenty presentations at high-profile sessions and plenaries at national and international meetings.

Funds from this grant provide two years of operational and research support to the Deep Life Community of the Deep Carbon Observatory. Led by US microbiologist Mitch Sogin and German biogeochemist Kai Hinrichs, the Deep Life Community is a global collaborative network of some 250 researchers working together to enhance our understanding of the nature, distribution, abundance, and limits of the deep biosphere. Funds from this grant will allow the Deep Life Community to conclude its research as the Deep Carbon Observatory approaches its planned conclusion in 2019, as well as begin integrative work to synthesize the community’s findings with the work of the larger DCO community. Grant funds will support the completion of three major sampling studies: one in mainland Oman, one in the Atlantis Massif on the north Atlantic seafloor, and one in the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan. Other funded research includes the completion of a “Census of Deep Life” that draws on deep life surveys of more than 90 locations worldwide. In addition, the Deep Life community continue laboratory studies of “extreme biophysics” that probe how biological molecules behave at high temperatures and pressures. Finally, the Deep Life Community will contribute several chapters to the technical volume that will summarize the entire body of DCO work and will contribute to the Deep Earth Carbon modeling initiative that provides integrative frameworks for the many faces of the DCO. The modeling has the exciting, maximal aim to predict the distribution of all deep life on Earth in space and time.

Funds from this grant provide two years of operational and research support to the Extreme Physics and Chemistry Community of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO). The Extreme Physics and Chemistry community is a global network of researchers working together to better our understanding of the physical and chemical properties of carbon in the high temperature, high pressure environments characteristic of the deep Earth. Led by geophysicist Wendy Mao of Stanford and geologist Craig Manning of UCLA, the community is concerned with the 90% of Earth’s carbon that resides in the interior as solids, magmas and melts, and low density fluids. It addresses the transformations that occur both as carbon rises from the core to the mantle to the crust and also as surface carbon is subducted beneath the crust and subjected to extraordinary temperatures and pressures. Grant funds will support research and administrative costs of the Extreme Chemistry community as it moves towards the planned conclusion of the DCO in 2019, with the majority of funds supporting a network of postdoctoral research associates at 20 participating institutions. Other funds support workshops, “hackathons,” and computational simulation and modeling work associated with integrating insights from the community with discoveries by the larger DCO community.

This grant provides research and operating support for the Biology of the Built Environment (BioBE) Center at the University of Oregon. Founded in 2010 with Sloan support, the BioBE Center conductsc research on the indoor microbiome and provides education about the microbiology of built environments. This grant provides continuing support for the Center’s ongoing outreach, research, and training activities and promotes Center efforts to implement a sustainable financing model that integrates their work with industry practice. BioBE’s central research question is: how does the design and operation of the built environment impact the built environment microbiome? The BioBE team has planned a series of experiments organized around three primary architectural decision realms that each have implications for health, energy-efficiency, and microbiome composition and function: (1) design for air (moving air for contaminant removal and thermal tempering), (2) light (illumination for visual tasks and definition of form), and (3) material selection (finish, substrates, and structure). Other funded work under this grant includes plans to expand and strengthen the nascent Health and Energy Industry Consortium, a group of 75 companies, professional firms, academics, and associations, and plans to educate undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students in architecture/biology about how design impacts the microbiome of built environments. The Center will also increase interdisciplinary course offerings that create new methodological approaches to education at the architecture-biology interface.  

This grant provides partial support for the planning and implementation of the fifth research phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V). The five-year project aims to use two telescopes (one in New Mexico and one in Chile) fitted with state of the art spectroscopic instruments to answer fundamental questions in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology about the forces shaping the origin, structure, and future of galaxies; the nature of supermassive black holes; and how regions between stars and galaxies, known as the interstellar medium, impact how these celestial objects form and grow. SDSS-V will be the most extensive spectroscopic observatory program in operation through the middle of the next decade. Over the course of five years, it will collect infrared spectra of over six million stars in the Milky Way (an order of magnitude more than have ever been observed), optical spectra of over 400,000 black holes, and over 25 million optical spectra of interstellar gas. As with previous phases, all data collected by SDSS-V will be released to both the scientific community and the general public under open principles, allowing non-affiliated scientists and stargazers alike to partake in SDSS discoveries. Planned technological improvements to the SDSS telescopes will make it one of the only observation programs capable of enhancing, complementing, and making the best use of data from other large astronomical surveys. Both SDSS-V telescopes will be equipped with rapidly reconfigurable fiber positioning technologies that will reduce the time it takes to collect object spectra from hours down to minutes. This will allow the SDSS to rapidly shift its focus and observe interstellar phenomena identified by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, the Kepler and TESS space missions, the Gaia space mission, and the eROSITA satellite. This grant provides approximately 25 percent of the total SDSS-V project budget and includes funds for project infrastructure and planning, research, instrumentation and technology development, and outreach and education. The remainder of funds will be raised from within the scientific community.

Funds from this grant support research by Harvard economist Richard Freeman that will link and then analyze 16 different data sets in order to examine the relationship between the increased employment/postponement of retirement by older workers and shifts in the demand for these workers associated with the changing composition of industries and the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic automation. Freeman will examine differences in employment and earnings of these workers by gender, education, health status, and income, and by industry, occupation, and firm and will study the impacts of these technologies on earnings, as well as employment. Overall, this project seeks to identify new patterns of work and retirement, determine their effect on worker well-being, and project whether these patterns are likely to continue among younger cohorts as they age. In addition to his own analysis, Freeman will commission 10 additional papers from leading economists using this new linked dataset, which will then be made available for public access through application to the Census Bureau research centers. All papers will be published as NBER Working Papers and submitted for publication in leading peer-reviewed journals.

This grant provides twenty months of continued support for a partnership between National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and the Associated Press (AP) to marry NORC’s research expertise with AP’s media reach to create a vehicle for promoting public understanding of the barriers and facilitators, as well as the causes and patterns, to people working beyond conventional retirement age in the United States. Funds from this grant will provide twenty months of salary support to a NORC-AP journalism fellow, who is selected through a competitive application process. The fellowwill cover the older work force beat, producing thoughtful, scientifically informed, high-quality articles on a variety of issues at the intersection of aging and work, including retirement, work and health, productivity, older workers and the gig economy, and the economic impact of an aging work force on businesses, pensions, and government programs like Social Security. In addition, NORC will field a high-quality, nationally representative survey of older adults about issues facing older workers with the results distributed nationwide through the AP. Survey reporting will be supplemented with reporting on new economic research on the older work force and survey data will be made freely available to researchers in a public-use dataset.

The grant provides two years of support to Deep Energy (DE) community of the Deep Carbon Observatory. Representing 176 researchers in 32 nations, the group is about half from the United States and half from the rest of the world, the Deep Energy Community is the branch of the DCO that examines the abundance, distribution, and origins of deep Earth abiotic hydrocarbons and the reactions between energy and rock that produce energy. Grant funds will provide research support to the community as it completes a set of eight initiatives on reduced carbon formation, the fate of reduced carbon, confined hydrogen behavior, isotopic bond ordering of methane, ocean floor serpentinization, Precambrian cratons, analysis of sediment cores taken from a drilling site in Oman, and monitoring of subsurface microbial activity rates. The last project, joint with the Deep Carbon Observatory’s Deep Life community, aims to determine how rapidly changes in subsurface metabolic activity occur in response to seismic events. (In plain words, earthquakes might cause deep microbial blooms.) Along with completing these studies, the DE community would carry out a range of activities to synthesize and integrate the component activities, including through the DCO’s collective effort to create a system of models of deep Earth carbon.

This grant to professor Rob Knight and Pieter Dorrenstein at the University of California San Diego funds efforts to develop and disseminate techniques for 3D mapping of the microbiology and metabolism of built environments. Knight and Dorrenstein will use commodity scanning and motion capture systems to build 3D models of built environments, track microbial movement through a room, and identify hundreds of swab locations in 3D space automatically. They also plan to upgrade QIITA (https://qiita.ucsd.edu/), the open source microbial study management platform, to include “living data” concepts from the Global Natural products Social Network (GNPS), allowing re-annotation of MoBE datasets and connection of 3D maps with microbes and molecules from thousands of other studies. They will also produce scans of at least eight visually and scientifically compelling built environments. To reach these objectives, the University of California, San Diego, team plans to develop and disseminate improved integrated software tools. They will produce a pipeline and kit for collecting datasets and producing 3D maps, which will then be tested by MoBE community members. They expect to create a set of visually and technically compelling maps of built environmental spaces in 3D, with sequence and metabolite information. They plan to share the information online through websites, blogs, and conference presentations. They plan to train at least 30 graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty and/or research staff through two workshops. Knight and Dorrenstein will share their research and findings through peer-reviewed publications. The expected outcome of this proposal is new, high-quality 3D maps of built environments that help future funders and stakeholders better visualize and understand the microbiology of the built environment.

This grant provides two years of operational support for the operation and enhancement of microbe.net, a website that provides services to the diverse community of researchers working at the intersection of microbiology and the built environment. Over the next two years, a team led by Jonathan Eisen at the University of California, Davis, plan to sustain the role of microBEnet as a critical hub for the field; develop and disseminate education, training, and outreach materials that will help sustain the MoBE field; build partnerships around key reference data sets in order to attract new methods, investigators, and collaborations in the field; develop synergistic interactions with other MoBE projects; and move microBEnet toward independent, long-term sustainability. The work plan includes further expansion of the network of site contributors and users. Eisen also plans to develop MoBE course materials; collect and post MoBE research protocols, conference reports, and unpublished white papers; support the addition of a MoBE component to existing Citizen Science projects; and encourage community members to curate Wikipedia pages on MoBE topics. In addition, Eisen plans to continue sequencing efforts to leverage reference datasets (genomes, metagenomics, and 16S rRNA surveys) to draw in new people to the field.

Bioinformaticist Holly Bik was particularly interested in broadening the ability of metagenomics researchers to take advantage of data visualization in order to explore and understand population distributions. With Sloan support, Bik developed Phinch, a web-based visualization platform that easily integrates with common tools like QIIME. This grant provides three years of funding to Bik to scale up Phinch and grow its user base into a sustainable community-supported software project. Her plan is to begin with a user workshop to refine already-collected requirements from existing users and metagenomics pipeline maintainers, then move back into active development. The technical goals laid out for the platform include the integration of statistical tools into visualization interfaces, an important step to help researchers move from exploration of data through visualization into more robust analysis.

In the behavioral sciences, fields like child development and behavioral ecology often rely on video as a primary source of research data. The major research repositories of behavioral video, however, do not have much more sophistication than YouTube, relying on keywords and transcripts for discovery and failing to leverage incredibly sophisticated coding data into analytic tools. Karen Adolph at NYU and Rick Gilmore of Penn State are accomplished psychologists who are responsible for developing a leading video coding tool, the open source Datavyu, and an innovative platform for behavioral video archiving, Databrary. The former is notable for its flexibility and fine-grained resolution, and the latter for its ability to set precise access controls to comply with the myriad restrictions related to the use of human subjects of the projects whose data it hosts. This grant supports an 18-month project by Adolph and Gilmore to use Datavyu and Databrary to model integration between coding tools and data repositories more generally. Since both platforms are open source and have active user communities, they are excellent candidates to prototype how standards-compliant coding data might be transferred into a data repository alongside its raw video, and how that repository might then leverage that coding data into new discovery and analytic interfaces. This work could generalize to a host of other coding tools, not to mention the handful of other social science data archives like ICPSR and Dataverse that are tentatively moving into hosting behavioral video data.

Developed by a small group of MIT computer science students, Julia was designed to be the “Goldilocks” of computer programming languages, combining the ease of use of high level languages like R or Python with the computing power of workhorse languages like C or Fortran. Julia has steadily grown in popularity since its 2012 release and has found particularly enthusiastic use in economics and finance. Further improving the language however, requires addressing several key pain points for research users. Funds from this grant support a project to update the Julia language and substantially improve usability for researchers by improving documentation and error messaging, building a substantially faster compiler, and developing a package manager to facilitate the discovery and use of third-party extensions. In addition, this grant includes resources for a concerted push to diversify the currently overwhelmingly white and male Julia developer community. Testing the application of models that have been successful in other open source software projects, the team will devote substantial effort to engagement with women and underrepresented minority groups, and offer travel subsidies for participation in Julia events to diversify its community.

In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers’ world view and modes of thought. University of Chicago computational sociologist James Evans and University of Wisconsin cognitive scientist Gary Lupyan hypothesize that a version of this hypothesis applies to programming languages. They propose to explore the “cognitive and social consequences of programming and data analysis environment” choices, specifically how the characteristics of programming languages might influence a developer’s efficiency, creativity, and collaboration. To evaluate this hypothesis, Evans and Lupyan will undertake exploratory studies of observational data on software development broadly then then look more closely at specific cases in scientific software development. They will use large-scale project data from GitHub to determine which specific features of programming languages (e.g., static vs. dynamic variable typing) might be best operationalized as independent variables that influence the ways in which developers think and work. They will then test the hypotheses that surface through that exploratory work using a series of comparative-language experiments to be run in constrained development environments, including the Jupyter Notebook platform. Grant funds provide three years of research support for the project.

A “math aware” search engine is exactly what it sounds like, a search engine that speaks and understands the language of mathematics. It would be able to locate not only words on pages, but to identify and recognize mathematical symbols, expressions, equations, formulas, and theorems. This is harder than it sounds, since common mathematical symbols can take on special meanings depending on the context in which they appear. This grant funds work by computer scientists Richard Zanibbi and Lee Giles to create an easy to use, fully math aware search engine. Zanibbi and Giles plan to develop state-of-the-art methods for extracting, indexing and retrieving math in documents; develop algorithms for the recognition of handwritten math and math captured in images; and implement these in a user-friendly interface with helpful features like autocompletion of common queries. The new engine will then be tested on Wikipedia and on CiteSeerX, an open-source repository of academic papers. The completed search engine, if successful, would vastly expand the possibilities of discovered for amateur and professional mathematicians alike, with numerous applications in both research and education.

This grant funds an initiative by the Association of Research Libraries to document and clarify copyright and intellectual property law issues related to the archiving of software. Led by intellectual property lawyer, Peter Jaszi, the initiative has three parts. First, Jaszi and a team of collaborators will undertake a broad literature review and conduct some 40 long-form interviews with legal experts, librarians, museum curators, software developers and other stakeholders to produce “a report on problems that arise in software preservation regarding issues of copyright and fair use.” The report will then become the basis for a set of small workshops to generate, after legal review, a code of reasonable best practices used by archivists to resolve those problems. Finally, a substantial outreach push will build community consensus in support of those best practices. The work will be stewarded by the Association of Research Libraries, whose membership has a strong interest in this area, but will also draw heavily on the museum community, as well as major professional organizations in computer science, and other computationally intensive disciplines. The effort promises the legal state-of-play surrounding several thorny intellectual property issues related to software archiving, promote better archival practices across the country and further the cause of reproducibility in research, which depends on the continued availability of software used to generate scientific results.

How do people decide between consuming more today and saving more for the future? Mainstream macroeconomists have one answer: the Euler Equation. Simply put, it says that an optimizing agent will consume today up to the point where adding one more unit now would provide the same utility that could be expected if consuming that extra unit were deferred until tomorrow instead. In principle, the attitude expressed by the Euler Equation seems reasonable enough. Surely if you knew that having a second dessert right now, for example, would not be as enjoyable as having that dessert tomorrow, you would do well to wait. Yet as a practical matter, such calculations are difficult or impossible for individuals to make. And we all know from experience that hardly anyone ever tries. Real people rely on heuristics at best, and are sometimes not only inconsistent but also self-defeating. The Euler Equation also has theoretical implications that limit its applicability to the real world. For instance, to a population governed by the Euler Equation, the timing of consumption does not depend on when income arrives. So Euler populations will not alter their behavior in response income events like tax cuts. But clearly people in the real world do so alter their behavior. This grant funds the research of Emi Nakamura and Jon Steinsson of Columbia University to test alternatives to the Euler Equation against a uniquely comprehensive dataset of the consumer behavior of the residents of Iceland, which has Iceland has usefully kept records of nearly every financial transaction in the country. The goal is to devise a replacement for the Euler Equation and to create new macroeconomic models that are both less naпve and more useful in predicting consumer behavior in the real world.

Effective government regulations can improve citizens’ health, safety, and financial well-being and reduce market imperfections. On the other hand, regulations that are poorly designed or implemented can impair markets, impose burdens, and impede innovation. There are potential benefits from regulatory interventions that mitigate imperfections but also potential costs from necessarily imperfect regulation. The challenge is to find an appropriate balance. This grant provides support for an initiative at the Brookings Institution to found a new, evidence-based, non-ideological Center on Regulation and Markets. In recent years, the trend has been for academics interested in regulation to specialize in environmental, health, labor, or other specific regulatory contexts. While this approach has many merits, such specialization deprives the field of the insights and wisdom that come from the wider study of regulation as such. The new Brookings Center will aim to recapture those insights and revitalize regulatory economics by incorporating recent behavioral, technological, societal, and legal perspectives. The new Center will initially concentrate on three work streams: Regulatory Processes and Perspectives, Market and Government Failures, and the Regulation of Financial Markets. Specific topics range from autonomous vehicles and the sharing economy to bankruptcy law and cost/benefit estimation methods. Outputs will include peer-reviewed papers, policy briefs, roundtables, and conferences.

Representing roughly $4 trillion globally, private capital plays an outsize role in productivity trends since its investments traditionally promote innovation and reorganization. Since private equity is private, however, there is very little available data on how venture capital or private equity firms invest in companies. What few studies we do have comes from proprietary data that cannot be shared and thus cannot be subjected to normal scientific attempts to replicate or check findings and results. Josh Lerner, a distinguished scholar at the Harvard Business School, is so keen on making data about this sector more available to academic researchers that he established a nonprofit, the Private Capital Research Institute (PCRI), explicitly for that purpose. This grant funds a project by Lerner and his team at PCRI to compile a large dataset of Certificates of Incorporation (COIs). COIs filings record significant details about the provision of private capital, including information on the capital structure and key terms of venture capital deals along with important information about valuation. Though supposedly public, COIs are in practice quite difficult to obtain or study other than one at a time. Lerner and the PCRI staff will use grant funds acquire approximately 6,000 COIs and begin compile a database that tracks 20-30 variables contained in COIs. The database will then be made available to academic researchers for research.

Evaluating the impact of proposed changes to the law requires predicting how people’s behavior will change in response to this or that policy change. These predications are made using microsimulations. Researchers compile data from a representative sample of the population, run models that estimate what those individuals will do in response to changes in, say, the tax code, and then aggregate the results. This is a traditional tool not just for economists but also for the study of traffic, finance, epidemiology, and crowds. The problem with microsimulations, however, is that they are computationally unwieldy. Running a sophisticated model requires lots of time and computing power. Funds from this grant support efforts by Robert McClelland at the Urban Institute’s Tax Policy Center (TPC) to take the next big step in microsimulation by harnessing the power of cloud-based computing. McClelland will move the TPC’s existing tax policy evaluation microsimulation models to the cloud, allowing the models to both be run faster and to allow multiple simulations to be run at once. This will make it routinely practical, for example, to see how robust results are to changes in parameter choices, to evaluate many different policy options and see which works best, and to handle nonlinearities due to thresholds in the tax code where different rules kick in or out. Basic statistical tasks—like obtaining variances, building confidence intervals, or testing hypotheses—should run in a matter of hours rather than months. These new capabilities will greatly enhance how useful TPC’s models are for rapidly understanding proposed changes in the tax code. The TPC team will then test these new capabilities by investigating three specific research questions: How does uncertainty in growth rates and recession timing affect projected tax revenues? How does sampling variation affect model behavior? And how can tax policies improve distributional outcomes without reducing revenue? Lastly, TPC will also launch an interactive website where the public can explore and visualize tax plans of their own design in real time.

This work funds methodological work by economist Susan Athey, who is aiming to develop rigorous new statistical algorithms that will allow machine learning programs to isolate causal relationships in large, complex datasets. Athey is building special new tools to handle methodological tasks that economists care about but often find challenging. These include novel techniques for taking heterogeneity into account while estimating treatment effects, calculating optimal policies, and testing hypotheses in very large and varied populations. Athey’s focus will be on computing algorithms that are particularly useful for evaluating policy interventions and that enable one to isolate how policy changes differentially affect the behavior of heterogeneous populations. As a result of her work, she expects to publish several pieces in peer reviewed statistical and econometric journals and all the algorithms, code, documentation, and nonproprietary data Athey and her team generates will be made freely available to other researchers.

Though it has been ten years since the Great Recession, the comprehensive macroeconomic models in use at central banks, government agencies, and other large financial institutions are not noticeably improved from a decade ago. Conversations with leaders of those institutions point to two fundamental flaws in traditional models, namely, the assumptions about representative agents and about rational expectations. These imply not only that the economy evolves as if there is only one consumer and only one firm but also that the consumer and the firm make optimal decisions based on predictions that are realized. Why are macroeconomists so reluctant to give up these stultifying assumptions? Because as hard as it is to run models with those assumptions, it is nearly impossible to compute much without them. Chris Carroll of Johns Hopkins University wants to fix this situation. While serving as chief economist at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), he started constructing an open source computational tool kit for macroeconomists that can specifically handle non-rational heterogeneous agents. The platform, the Heterogeneous Agents Resources Kit (HARK), is capable of modeling how microeconomic interactions among heterogeneous agents can lead to macroeconomic outcomes different from those predicted by traditional techniques. It is also possible to assign less-than-rational behaviors—such as hyperbolic discounting, anchoring, or herding—to parts of the population. Running simulations under those circumstances can reveal phenomena that traditional models can neither explain nor even generate. This grant provides three years of support to Carroll as he further expands and develops HARK and creates tools to facilitate its use.

This grant funds a project by Hunt Allcott, Dmitry Taubinsky, and Jonathan Zinman to four common kinds of consumer decisions and then use those models to analyze the welfare implications of potential policy interventions aimed at altering these decisions. They plan to examine supposed “mistakes” people make making decisions about sugar-sweetened beverages, credit card borrowing, checking account overdrafts, and college enrollment. In each context, the research team will start by formulating a theoretical model that can accommodate a range of consumer behaviors. Next, they will perform empirical analyses using experimental, quasi-experimental, and survey designs to identify biases and test predictions. Then they will analyze the empirical welfare implications various regulatory or other interventions aimed at altering consumer choices in these areas. In addition to covering data collection costs, grant funds will support a research assistants and a single project manager for all four studies.

While advances in information technology may be changing our lives, they are not necessarily translating into greater productivity or prosperity for the economy as a whole. Having peaked in the 1950s, productivity growth fell dramatically in the U.S. from 2004 to 2008. The last five years have seen some of the lowest levels since the U.S. began collecting such statistics. This grant funds a project by John Van Reenen of MIT and Nicholas Bloom of Stanford to study how R&D investment in the U.S. affects the productivity growth rate. In previous work, Van Reenen and Bloom have identified how organizational innovations affect worker productivity. This grant funds an extension of that work as the team tries to isolate the role research and development plays in productivity by studying what they call “Ideas-TFP.” From a macroeconomic view, the team will examine trends in Ideas-TFP across countries and regions. At the meso level, they will concentrate on a few key sectors, such as medical and agricultural innovation. Focusing further on individual firms, they will compile private and public data about R&D spending as well as patenting and new product introductions. Of particular concern to the team will be constructing measures of market “dynamism” that reflect the rates at which jobs and firms are created or destroyed. The datasets compiled and shared by this project will also help other recent grantees, since estimating the returns on R&D is one of the animating and abiding goals for the Sloan Foundation’s subprogram on the Economic Analysis of Science and Technology.

This grant funds a suite of three research projects by Heidi Williams of MIT to estimate the returns on R&D investments. All three projects deal with how private and public interests diverge and to what extent that divergence is mitigated or created by the patent system. The first study asks how much “stealing” from previous innovations may increase private returns without necessarily increasing social returns. Working with Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Williams will measure “citations stolen” from patents that served as “prior art” for a given innovation. Because advances do not always come about due to new knowledge per se, but rather due to marginal or technical improvements on existing technologies, “follow-on innovations” can earn more private returns than warranted by the new social value they create. Williams will compare citation data between successful and unsuccessful patent applications to help quantify the extent to which progress depends on substituting new ideas for old ones, rather than the generation of completely new or disruptive capabilities. For the second study, Williams and co-authors Pat Kline (University of California, Berkeley), Nevianna Petkova (U.S. Office of Tax Analysis), and Owen Zidar (University of Chicago Booth School of Business) will merge data on U.S. patent applications with IRS tax records to investigate which firms and which workers profit from a patent. By carrying out event studies, the team will specifically trace how spillovers accrue to private parties other than the original inventors. The third study, with Eric Budish (Chicago Booth) and Ben Roin (MIT Sloan School of Management), seeks evidence to support the common but unproven assumption that patents increase innovation. What happens, for example, when the patent for a basic ingredient expires, but a “new use” is found during the unprotected period? Preliminary findings indicate a drop-off in for-profit (but not publicly funded) research on a drug once a generic competitor can enter the market. Williams and her collaborators will estimate the social value of “missing” research investments that private interests are not undertaking now, but would if incentive systems were different.

The Conversation U.S. (TCUS) is an independent and nonprofit news outlet that produces popular articles by academics about their research. Articles on the site are written and titled by researchers themselves, edited in cooperation with skilled journalists, and then published under a Creative Commons CC-BY license, allowing other publications like The Atlantic, Washington Post, and New York Times to republish them to their own readers. Since its founding in 2014, some 3,400 scholars from 525 universities have written for TCUS. Including republished articles, the number of “reads” has grown to more than six million per month. Funds from this grant provide two years of support to the Business and Economics desk at TCUS, allowing the continued publication of articles on timely topics in economics and finance. In addition to defraying operational costs, grant funds will support the hiring of a researcher responsible for identifying top professors whose academic work is timely and compelling enough for TCUS to turn into popular, authoritative, and important news.

This grant provides four years of renewed support to a postdoctoral fellowship program run by the National Bureau of Economic Research which supports talented young researchers interested in working on the economics of an aging workforce. Fellows receive a one-year stipend to carry out research at NBER’s office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as limited funds for research-related purposes. In addition, fellows have the opportunity to participate in NBER’s weekly lunch seminars, NBER’s Summer Institute workshops on Aging and Labor Studies, relevant activities related to the larger NIA-NBER fellows program on Aging, and collaborative research and networking activities with a similar postdoctoral fellowship program at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Selection of the three fellows per year will be made by a panel of experts who are members of both the Aging and Labor Studies NBER programs. Nicole Maestas of Harvard University will chair the selection committee, which will include leading scholars in the fields of labor economics and the economics of aging. The committee’s decisions will be based on their evaluation of the fellows’ potential to make an important contribution to the understanding of the behavior of older workers and the functioning of labor markets for these workers.

To make sound decisions about potential changes to Social Security, Medicare, and other retirement programs, policymakers need reliable, objective predictions based on the best available data on how reforms would likely affect retiree income and benefits, labor market activities, taxpayer burdens, and program costs and solvency. The predictions are often provided by DYNASIM, the Urban Institute’s well-respected microsimulation model. This grant funds a project by the Urban Institute to expand and improve the DYNASIM model. DYNASIM is a more ambitious tool than nearly every policy evaluation model in use today. It attempts to predict a wider range of outcomes than do most models developed by CBO or the analytical offices of Cabinet agencies. For example, a raise in the early and full retirement ages would almost certainly affect retirement ages, earnings, savings patterns, and the distribution of incomes of those 60 to 74 years in age. It may also influence marriage rates and living arrangements, and could indirectly affect the health status and health insurance coverage of some older Americans. Simple models often focus on just one or two of these outcomes. DYNASIM’s predictions, however, attempt to capture all these indirect effects. With this grant, the Urban Institute will develop further the predictive capabilities of DYNASIM so that the model can be used to produce credible and detailed predictions of the impact of government policy reforms that affect the nation’s elderly. The programs of interest include Social Security, including its Disability Insurance (SSDI), Medicare, tax policies that affect retirement saving, and important components of Medicaid. The grant will examine how reforms in one or more of these programs will affect old-age labor supply, the prevalence of old-age poverty, the distribution of income in old age, out-of-pocket spending on health care in old age, and tax burdens of the elderly. The DYNASIM model will also produce predictions of the effects of these policy changes on both the elderly and the nonelderly. In addition to providing for the needed improvements, the grant includes funds to maintain DYNASIM during the project period, such as by incorporating the latest economic and demographic assumptions used by Social Security and updating tax and other policy parameters. In addition, the Urban Institute team will use some funds to train additional DYNASIM analysts, to ensure the sustainability of the model, and to find ways to provide access to other researchers, so that it can continue to provide the research and policy community with the best information on the effects of retirement policy reforms after the grant period ends.

The Science and Entertainment Exchange was launched by the National Academy of Sciences in 2008 to pair members of the science community with the entertainment industry. The Exchange works to ensure accuracy when science is used in film, tries to seed new ideas within the film and television industry by exposing them to new content, and acts as a resource of professional science advice, including to Sloan’s myriad film partners. This grant funds a series of activities by the Exchange to bolster scientific representation in Hollywood films and television, increase the diversity of its science consultants, and strengthen ties with the Sloan Film program. Grant funds will support the Exchange as it provides science consultants to the film and television community and to Sloan filmmakers on some 300 television and film projects per year. Additional funds will support efforts to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities in the Exchange’s scientist database and on efforts to include Sloan-supported filmmakers in their Exchange events and outreach.

This grant provides funds to Film Independent (FIND) to organize and host the 2017 Sloan Film Summit, the major convening of all Sloan film grantees held every three years. The summit offers a rare opportunity for interaction and networking between students, faculty, and administrators from the Foundation’s six film schools; filmmakers and staff from the five screenplay development and film festival partners; and Sloan grantees at Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI), Coolidge Corner Theatre, and the Science and Entertainment Exchange. 150 Sloan grantees are expected to attend. The three-day summit will open with a Friday night film screening on the theme of women and science, followed by an opening dinner. Saturday morning will feature Sloan award recipient updates as well as case studies with filmmakers and scientist collaborators. In the afternoon, there will be a networking lunch that connects filmmakers with scientists, followed by an industry connect program allowing filmmakers to meet with agents, casting directors, distributors, and other industry representatives. During this time, representatives from all of Sloan’s film partners will meet with Sloan program staff to share experiences and discuss best practices. Later, breakout sessions involving the latest in virtual reality will be followed by a special evening event. Sunday will open with a science and storytelling keynote from a prominent member of the film or television industry. After the keynote, there will be staged readings of excerpts from Sloan-winning screenplays for an industry audience. The summit will conclude with a showcase of Sloan-supported feature films, including one completed feature and sneak previews of upcoming features. Grant funds support administrative costs associated with hosting the event, along with associated publicity and outreach in print and social media.

This grant continues a Sloan Foundation partnership with Film Independent (FIND), producer of the Independent Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival, to support filmmakers and television writers who explore scientific or technical themes in their work or create films that feature scientists, engineers, technologists, or mathematicians as major characters. The FIND program includes a host of interrelated and mutually supportive activities that promote this goal. FIND selects one producer per year to develop a science-themed script in FIND’s Producing Lab, with a $30,000 producer’s grant and a reception and promotion around this project; award one producer or producing team per year a Sloan Fast Track Fellowship with a $20,000 grant and invitation to the Fast Track film financing market; select one outstanding episodic television writer per year and award him or her with a $10,000 grant to develop a science-themed series in FIND’s new Episodic Lab; and award two distribution grants of $50,000 each to an exceptional science-themed film to incentivize buyers to acquire it for distribution. Grant funds will support these awards and associated administration and outreach costs for the next three years.

The grant provides support for an initiative by the Center for Science and Imagination at Arizona State University, partnering with MIT Press, MIT Media Lab, and Plympton Literary Studio, to create an open-access digital edition of Mary Shelley’s landmark novel Frankenstein. The digital “Living Frankenstein” edition—titled Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers and Creators of All Kinds—will present an innovative reading experience and compelling new digital content to the 21st century reader, including a podcast series, videos, and graphical interactives. It is also constructed on the software platform PubPub, developed by MIT to facilitate large-scale collaborative authorship and peer review, which will allow readers to explore multiple layers of content while annotating, commenting, and curating material that they can share with a wide community. The project tackles the novel’s age-old themes of creation and responsibility—and its contemporary relevance to artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering, and more—to foster an engaged community of readers and a new interactive reading experience timed to the novel’s 200th anniversary in 2018. The digital edition will offer a unique encounter between a great literary text and contemporary issues of science and technology refracted through an interactive digital medium that seeks to transform the reading experience and advance public understanding and community engagement with science and technology.

Funds from this grant support efforts by PRX Incorporated to develop, distribute, and promote podcasts featuring high-quality scientific content or that explore scientific themes. Over the next two years, PRX plans to produce 10 episodes of the Orbital Path podcast, a new monthly program hosted by astronomer Michelle Thaller which covers astronomy, space science, and cosmology; 12 episodes of The Outside, an outdoor-focused podcast about survival science and the science of adventure; 1 science-themed episode of The Moth podcast 2 science-themed episodes of the 99% Invisible podcast 1 science-themed episode of the Theory of Everything podcast 12 episodes of Go Flight, a podcast developed in partnership with the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum 12 episodes of Sidedoor, a new podcast developed with the Smithsonian that tells stories about science, art, history, humanity and their surprising interconnections. In addition, PRX will continue to develop and promote Transistor, a broad science channel that showcases audio pieces from the open-call STEM Story Project and tests new ideas and formats from independent producers. PRX intends to use this platform to develop a new signature podcast and will launch with 18 new episodes.

The grant provides production support to filmmaker Ric Burns for a new documentary about Oliver Sacks, the celebrated neurologist, clinician, and bestselling writer who died in 2015. Upon receiving his fatal diagnosis, Sacks invited Burns to film his final days and this production will draw on some 80 hours of unique footage from the end of Sack’s life, as well as other footage covering the full arc of Sacks’ remarkable career. Foundation funding includes support for the addition of three science advisors to the project, to ensure the accuracy of the film’s portrayal of Sack’s work The finished film will have a theatrical release, a US and international film festival run, and will be broadcast on American Masters on PBS.

The Women in Energy (WIE) program is an initiative developed by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University to provide professional development and networking opportunities to female students interested in a range of energy issues. Launched in 2015 with Sloan Foundation support, the program hosts seminars and networking events, provides mentoring, and gives summer internship stipends for students at universities both in the greater New York City region and, increasingly, the larger northeastern area of the United States. The program also connects current female students with female leaders in the energy sector from government, industry, and nonprofits. This grant provide two years of renewed support for the program.

Funds from this grant support a multi-institutional and multidisciplinary research project led by two economists at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) (Beia Spiller and Kristina Mohlin) working in collaboration with power systems engineers at MIT (Karen Tapia-Ahumada and Ashwini Bharatkumar) and regulatory analysts at New York University (Burcin Unel) to understand how alternative electricity rate designs might impact the reliability of electricity distribution grids. Many households face a fixed, per kilowatt hour rate from their utility for their electricity use—whether it is midnight in the winter (when overall demand for electricity is low) or whether it is late afternoon on a hot, sunny summer day (when demand is high). Some utilities, however, are experimenting with a host of demand-varying pricing schemes, so that consumers pay higher per kilowatt hour costs when demand is high. There are many versions of these time varying rate design schemes (real time pricing, time of use pricing, variable and critical peak pricing, etc.). By changing the economic incentives facing consumers, these policies could impact the introduction of various distributed energy resources on the grid. You may, for example, be more inclined to install solar panels on your roof to generate your own power on hot, sunny summer afternoons to avoid paying much higher electricity rates during those times. Spiller, Mohlin, and their team plan to expand existing engineering simulation models and then apply them to real world data supplied through a partnership with ComEd of Illinois. This will allow them to estimate how various dynamic pricing schemes would affect investments in solar panels and other distributed energy resources, and how the subsequent impacts such investments would have on pollution, electricity prices, and total system costs.

This grant funds a collaboration between University of California, Davis energy economists James Bushnell and David Rapson and distribution systems engineer, Duncan Callaway of the University of California at Berkeley. The group plans to study how the rise of distributed energy resources (DERs) like rooftop solar panels and electric vehicles impact power quality and distribution system performance in California. Working with utilities (such as Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric Company) and state government regulators (including the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Air Resources Board), Bushnell and his colleagues will collect and combine data on solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle registrations and then map them to individual circuits in the California electricity distribution grid. This will allow the team to analyze in fine-grained detail how increases in solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicles are likely to strain elements of the California electricity distribution system. The team will then investigate how the performance of distribution systems maps to various socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of California residents.

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) employs a substantial number of postbaccalaureate and postdoctoral scientists and economists. These positions train scholars how to undertake policy-relevant science and economics research in an applied setting, outside the university. This grant provides support to EDF to develop a more formalized training, networking, and mentoring program that will train 25 to 30 early-career researchers in the ancillary skills needed to succeed in applied research environments. Training will cover such topics as communications, proposal writing, program management, and team leadership. EDF will also organize a series of workshops that separately target postbaccalaureates and postdoctoral researchers to reflect the different skill development needs among these two groups and will implement a formal mentoring system that will link their postdoctoral fellows with senior scholars across the institution. Finally, EDF’s in-house social scientists will implement a series of surveys among participants to track the impact of this program over time.

Since 2001, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) has served as the sole administrative manager for the Foundation’s graduate scholarship programs for underrepresented minorities, the Minority Ph.D. program (MPHD) and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP). NACME verifies student eligibility, disburses scholarship funds, and tracks student progress. This grant continues support for these and other activities for another three years. In addition to these activities, over the next three years NACME Vice President Christopher Smith and Program Manager Denise Ellis plan to launch several new initiatives related to Sloan fellowship programs, including community building among campuses participating in the MPHD and SIGP, financial analysis of scholarship funds, and reporting on the academic progress of scholarship recipients. In addition, they will begin to administer surveys to supported students both as they join the program and at graduation.